Access control is a must-have when it comes to commercial security. But it also suffers from an image problem. In fact, it is often underestimated by end users who limit its features to only locking and unlocking the doors.
Here are other access control assets and emerging trends:
- Scalability:
With a constantly changing environment, business owners want infrastructures & IT systems that can evolve with their activity, to whom they can add features when and where their business needs it.
- Ease of use:
Even complex features don’t have to be complicated to run. That’s why manufacturers and integrators are introducing more and more intuitive processes into their systems. The objective of this strategy is to make their products affordable to the general public, who could use the access control systems without a 300 page manual. If the technology is easy to use, procedures will be easily adopted by the employees and corporate access control will be successful.
- Reporting capabilities:
Regardless of the size of the company, business owners need to know who is accessing their premises at any time. Access control systems allowing the doors to open and close is not enough anymore. They need to identify the comings and goings, store the related data and classify them into reports for business owners to measure the use of their premises. However some of these reporting functionalities are still considered today as not customizable enough. An opportunity for industry integrators and manufacturers to investigate further.
- Analytics:
Beyond the reporting capabilities, businesses need to use the data recorded by access control systems to go further and analyze/alert in real time if there is a problem in a defined area and/or order the access control system to lock or unlock a door. As innovation is kicking in and bringing more new features, analytics will more and more integrated into access control systems, even the most basic ones.
- Price versus value/ROI.
During an economic downturn, cost reduction is a business’s first challenge. However, in recent years, other assets like quality, reliability, support and value seem to take precedence over price. Even in times of crisis, companies prefer to pay for something they consider valuable over time. When it comes to access control systems, businesses expect more than the basic doors’ opening/closing. They also need to solve specific internal issues to get a competitive advantage. The downside of access controls system is their unforeseen ROI value. Indeed, it can be rather complicated for managers to show the ROI of such an infrastructure to their executives. That’s why it is crucial for businesses to understand all that this system is capable of, and how it will affect their activities.
- Integration & other Features:
Another must have in an access control system, is its capacity to be integrated into other security and non-security tools. From “active directory” to “open architecture”, access control is definitely going further than just the basic access control. Sometimes what businesses think they need and what they really use don’t match up. It’s often crucial to bring industry experts into the conversation to prevent the creation of unsuitable, even useless access control systems.
- Mobile apps:
Last but not least, the smart phone revolution did not miss access control systems. Being able to use the phone as a credential and manage the system remotely, without the use of a traditional but out of fashion cards, has been one of the most exciting features for potential business clients. The speed of adoption to this technology has been relatively fast, compared with past, “exciting” innovations such as smart cards and biometrics.Even if biometrics are increasingly popular, it is still not considered as a must have technology, but as a popular “niche application”. Besides, end users as integrators must not forget that the coming generation doesn’t know what it is like to live without a smartphone.
Therefore, we can also expect an increase of manageability and support features over time.
And with the predicted 50 billion IoT devices by 2020, mobile apps and other IoT solutions, access control systems definitely have a bright future ahead of them.
More questions on how Access Control Systems can contribute to your activity? Contact us today!