Flexible work models require flexible access control. Managing shared desks, lockers, and parking spaces with a single digital identity saves effort — and closes security gaps that distributed, siloed systems inevitably leave behind.
The trend towards home office and shared desk models has become firmly established in recent years. Dedicated workstations and mandatory in-office presence are a thing of the past for many companies — and this brings real benefits: lower operating costs, reduced CO2 emissions, and greater flexibility for employees.
But the shared office needs to be organized and secured. And this is precisely where the weaknesses of many legacy IT infrastructures become apparent.
In a traditional office, access control was relatively simple: everyone had their assigned desk, their designated area, their fixed hours. In the shared desk model, this changes daily. Who is sitting where today? Who is allowed to enter which area? Who needs a parking space, who needs a locker?
If identity management is spread across multiple siloed systems — a booking system here, access control there, locker management somewhere else — flexibility quickly turns into administrative overhead. And administrative overhead leads to security vulnerabilities.
Our belief: The solution lies not in more systems, but in fewer. A single digital identity per person, which all authorization-relevant systems access — workstation booking, access control, lockers, parking, time tracking.
This offers a crucial practical advantage: If an employee leaves the company or an ID card is lost, all authorizations are revoked with a single action. No system remains open. No access is forgotten.
What we repeatedly observe in our daily work: Companies fear switching to a centralized identity management system because they believe they have to rebuild their entire IT infrastructure for it. The opposite is true.
A well-designed ID management system integrates into the existing IT and HR landscape — not the other way around. IDfunction is always configured and adapted to reflect the customer's processes, not to adapt the customer's processes to the software.
Establishing clear structures saves unnecessary extra work — especially in the age of shared desks.
1Source: Juris.de | 2Source: IBM | 3Source: Fraunhofer Institut
