Accessible Access Control

Integrated security management is an achievable goal for businesses and organisations of almost any size, allowing for increased situational awareness, and value driven security programs tailored to providing effective incident identification and rapid response, writes Peter Richards

Traditional access control systems were often stand alone deployments and focused towards securing assets through the use of locks and credential authentication. This is of course the fundamental of any access control system, but the industry is evolving with the emergence of ever increasing integrated solutions.

The latest generation of access control solutions are capable of more than simply locking and unlocking a door, prompting the effective deployment of other security devices and providing  operators with situational awareness and additional value for the deployment of this technology, measurable through increased productivity and reaction speed.

With the increased use of access control systems in public and private sector businesses, having the ability to integrate access control with other security systems can provide clear benefits, not only in regards to costs associated with the overall security system but also through increase system capability and effectiveness when several systems can be brought together under an single security management platform.

Some may question why integrated security management is necessary, especially when a site is operating with a fully functional and effective access control, video surveillance, and other security systems in place. The primary response to this is based on user needs to have real time situational awareness, incident identification, and response capabilities. It is true, some sites may be comfortable running a stand-alone access control platform along with two or three other independent security systems to provide high level access management and post-incident forensic information. Yet, other developments require security information to support their core operations and the availability and real-time management of all security systems is critical to business success.

The latter argument is not new, and for the past few decades, businesses that invested substantially in security management-often through costly and custom integration systems-were able to achieve a formidable level of security integration. On the other side, small or medium businesses and developments could simply not afford the high cost and lack of value integration may provide.

Fortunately, with advancement of access control and other security systems onto the IT network platforms and the substantial growth and diversification of the global security systems market, integrated security management is an achieveable goal for businesses and organisations of almost any size, allowing for increased situational awareness, and value driven security programs tailored to providing effective incident identification and rapid response.

Traditional systems

Before jumping into the modern, let’s take a look at how traditional access control systems have, and are still, being deployed. Traditional access control systems are often independent from camera surveillance systems. Traditional access control systems rely on old generation wiring configurations (RS-232, RS-485, etc.) that communicate between field devices and panels with proprietary (manufacturer specific) communications formats. The ability to communicate between different manufacturer devices or integration of two systems is often a major challenge. Where integration was required, this utilised extensive hard-wired and custom software integration to allow for the two systems to talk, with the output being limited to a simple alarm or notification message. The traditional integration would require an operator to perform several functions to gain situational awareness, decreasing coherence for the operator. This lack of integration made the operator’s job more difficult as they had multiple separate sources of information to analyse. By preventing these multiple technologies from being displayed and controlled together there is a significant increase to workload of security monitoring staff. This workload increase can lead to operator errors, misjudgement of incident requirements, and inevitably slowing the incident identification, response, and resolution.

Conversely, advancements within access control systems have not only made deployment of access control systems more cost effective for a wider range of organisations and developments, but have also increased how beneficial the access control systems are to an organisation. In times of tight budgets, squeezing more value options out of each dirham we spend is essential to gaining Where previously utilised for simply controlling who goes into a building, advancements in access control integration allows for access control systems to become an organisation wide resource.

Some access control integration options are as follows:

• Video surveillance
• Intercommunications
• Employee time and attendance
• RFID asset tracking and monitoring
• Building visitor and parking management
• Emergency management

By integrating access control security devices operators gain increased situational awareness, and faster access to relevant information, which is organised and presented clearly through a single graphical interface. This information, in addition to assisting the decision making process, can simultaneously feed into effective data collection reports such as employee time and attendance. Status reports can be viewed on a dashboard and summarised for operators, freeing up considerable man hours previously spent on report writing.

We have to constantly consider the cost/risk benefit of our security recommendations to Clients. In the case of integrated systems one cost benefit comes from having more choice and being more easily able to expand a system being installed now, at future dates. With older analogue systems, structured cabling was always a limiting factor, it was expensive and space consuming. Any possible future expansion had to be considered in the first instance and often the supporting backbone had to be installed and paid for at the beginning of a project, even if the roll out was over many phases, the infrastructure needed to be considered in phase one.

With the move to Internet Protocol (IP) it is possible to build a modular physical security solution that is more integrated. Through IP devices being able to sit on the data network there is no need for additional cabling, and it is often the case that IP security devices can take advantage of existing infrastructure and existing investments in IP data networks. The more simple the management of security systems can be made, the further total cost of ownership can be reduced through simplicity comes increased staff productivity. We are seeing an increase in products that are using standards based protocols and as such, are interoperable and ideal for integrated systems.

As a consultancy that is supplier impartial and independent, we make our recommendations based on performance specification. With this increased interoperability we are seeing across manufacturers, our clients have more flexibility than in previous years in sourcing devices that suit not only their technical requirements but also fit within project budgets. The trend in the region is certainly moving towards access control systems that are fully integrated with other security systems such as video surveillance, perimeter intrusion detection and fire and life safety systems.

Peter Richards is principal security consultant at WSP Middle East. For more information visit: www.wspgroup.ae