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Shopping for Building Access Security?
JoeCommodore asks: "At work we are planning a new facility, which will combine a lot of departments into one bigger building. We think it may be time to forgo analog key access and go with access cards (or something like it) for physical security. I could see the benefits (we don't have to collect keys and re-do locks on staff turnover, selective room access, access logs, and so forth). Beyond this, we are pretty clueless on the ins and outs of such systems, so I am asking those of you who have had to shop, install, administer, or even just regularly use such systems, what are your thoughts, recommendations, or opinions? This is pre-building so we can do just about anything within reason."
Once you lock the doors with electronics remmeber power outages can and will hurt. Also your security is right out the window (door in the case!).
Plan for no power to power the locks.
1) One company, they planned for power outages, by placing the key control computer in a closet, with its own UPS. The day the building went dark (failed breaker) the key control was working find, the servers were on their own UPS. Every desktop was down; the wireless routers and inter-floor routers/switches were down; OH the doors to server were locked - NO power open them. We all could see in the computer room though the big glass window as the equipment started to hardfail.
2) At another company, once the power fails, all doors are opened and blocked with a chair to allow employees and anyone else though. All the video cameras are offline along with every switch. It would have been better just to clear the building and send everyone home.
So keep a few keys, they help.
We actually discussed this topic quite extensively recently here: http://www.servomagazine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t =4949
Originally, my boss Pete suggested that we use saliva - that would make entering the building a matter of simply licking the sensor.
Later on (in the discussion linked above) we thought it might be even better to try and grab some DNA from urine. That way, you could kill two birds with one stone - gain entrance to the building and relieve your bladder all at once. If your company does periodic drug screening then you could just integrate that into the process too.
Still, nothing beats the simplicity of just licking the sensor.
I'm a security manager at a University in the states. We're moving more and more toward electronic access control for many of the reasons you state. As always, they wanted us to do it on a budget, but I feel we've managed to install a respectable system.
We use a product of a GE child company called IdentiCard. It's a low proximity system that will do just about anything you would like it to do. To activate a reader, you must hold a card within a few inches of the reader. The typical cards store only a uniqe number that is associated with a user account in the backend. There are also smart-card variations available that work with the system (there are several smartcard programming features in the control software). Making the cards is as simple as printing the card design, assigning the card to a user, then running it through a laminator (takes a long time if you've got to make several hundred or even thousand).
The backend of the system consists of an SQL database of users, cards, access groups, reader groups, etc. The physical system consists basically of readers, the data cables, per-building (or per-area) controllers which connect to the readers, then the cabling back to the primary server in our IT department. The cable they ran seems to be some proprietary bundle of wires, but they claim they can even do things like video integration and whatnot with it.
The only thing I have not liked about the system is that each user may be assigned only 3 access groups. While an efficient and well-managed access control policy deals with this just fine, it requires you to think ahead on what access groups you want. But then, you can also define as many groups as you want, you just can't assign more than three to any single user.
Identicard Home Page: http://www.identicard.com/