Facilities of all types looking to secure their buildings typically look to CCTV, access control and intrusion detection as their top three “go-to” technologies.

Wireless locks today are much more than the standalone, battery-operated locks of the past. While they still are experiencing a few growing pains, more often they are being considered a viable alternative to — and even replacement for — hardwired locks.

When it comes to access control products and systems, whether the end user is a small 5- to 10-door business or a multi-city enterprise, chances are they ultimately will use only a small fraction of the feature-rich products that are available to them. It is far more important for the system to fit seamlessly into the larger business and its goals.

It’s hard to go about daily life now without hearing about “the cloud.” Apple, Amazon, Dropbox, computers and even your local bank now offer cloud storage. People use the cloud every day, whether they realize it or not, says John Szczygiel, executive vice president and chief operating officer, Brivo Systems LLC, Bethesda, Md.

For security integrators and dealers many sales often don’t go beyond the front door the customer wants to secure, which can represent a lost opportunity. There are a multitude of applications for security locks (both mechanical and electronic) that go far beyond external or even internal doors.

When Matthew Petnuch, vice president of sales and marketing, Intertech Security, Pittsburgh, Pa, needed to install access control readers in a pharmaceutical plant, he knew that those readers would have to be chemically washed on a regular basis.

Stop thinking of access control credentials as strictly physical devices, or cards. Today’s technology brings credentials into the realm of the digital.

When it comes to merging the benefits of physical and logical access control, there continues to be a lot of talk amongst integrators and their customers but not much action. 

In Star Trek, the Starship Enterprise is tasked with the mission to “boldly go where no man has gone before.” And while space may be the final frontier, for the integrator, designing for a large enterprise-level access control system is a bit like being on that aptly named starship. 

If you ask 12 different security people what “entry control” means, you will likely get 12 different answers.