CAMS stands for Card & Application Management System. Depending on your industry, you may also have heard of it as SCMS (Smart Card Management System). Either way, the concept is the same; a CAMS is a piece of software that acts as central ‘engine’ in a card issuance scheme.

When a company (or bank, or government) wishes to issue smart cards to its staff (or customers, or citizens), it needs some way of managing and keeping track of the cards. To whom have cards been issued? At what stage in its life-cycle is a particular card (authorised, produced, in use, revoked)?

Application management deals with the applications on the card, which may include physical access to buildings, logical access to computers or networks, e-purse or cashless vending, biometrics, digital certificates, and many others. The application management component of a CAMS sits in the middle of all these applications and manages their life-cycle too. What applications have been added to which cards? What is their status (active, revoked)?

It is important to note that although a CAMS will sit in the middle of everything and do its job – managing things – it does not provide these things. For biometrics, you will still need to approach a company specialising in biometrics; for logical access, you will still need to approach a company providing logical access systems.

Of course, the more complicated the whole set-up, the more complex the CAMS system will have to be. At the higher end of the market, a sophisticated CAMS like Bell ID’s ANDiS becomes a need-to-have rather than an optional component.