Archive for category: Access Control

By Neal Bellamy, IT Director at Kenton Brothers

One of the most critical aspects of planning a commercial security system design for a facility is organization. Taking the time to get the details right ensures that all users of the system easily understand how the various components and functions will work together. One of the topics that can cause a lot of confusion is how to verbally reference a specific door inside your building(s).

Depending on the size and nature of your business, an organization can end up having to secure a lot of doors!

Part of the KB Advantage is that we take pride in creating custom solutions for our clients. And that’s not marketing speak… We actually enjoy the process of working with you to design customized commercial security systems that will protect your people, property and possessions. We also like partnering with you to maintain or update your existing commercial security systems. Knowing that employees feel safer, and security officers have more confidence in their system, puts a smile on our face.

Regardless of the size of your access control system, it’s a good rule of thumb to have a naming convention established for the various doors in your system. For smaller systems, this is as easy as naming a door Main Entry or Employee Door. But what about when we’re talking about a system that has 10, 20, or even 500 doors? This is where you will see the value of our 127 years of experience providing commercial security solutions to businesses nationally.

A Conversation with Vince

I sat down with one of our employees, Vince Gelei, to learn more about our best practices for door naming conventions. Vince is experienced in the process of building and programming the many access control systems we provide for our customers.

Sometimes, it’s hard to put into perspective the number of devices that are involved in the access control programming for a single door. Without having some structure, the system can become convoluted and hard for both the end user and integrator to operate and maintain. Vince provided some great insight on the key factors for developing such a framework within an access control system:

• End User’s Security Capacity – Determining the technical level of our customers plays a big part in system design. (We can’t provide a solution that’s hard for our customers to understand and use.) We want to make sure the final naming conventions will be an intuitive reference for the end user. This is the first priority in system programming.
• Access Control System – The commercial security system that the customer has chosen also plays a big part in how we set up naming conventions. The capabilities of their system dictate what we can and cannot do when setting up doors and their naming structure.
• Territory or Location – We would want to set up a City Reference if you have a national presence. For a specific region all the way down to a single building, we would set up a Building Reference. (These terms are the first step in verbally referencing a specific door.)
• Total Door Count of Site – When we know ahead of time how many doors are on site and how they function, we can document this in your access control system. (This is not a feature supported in all access control platforms. This is another reason why our system design process is critical.)
• Site Floor Plans – With existing floor plans we can document the solution for quick reference.
• Door Numbers – Do the facilities have pre-established door numbers? If your building already has door numbers, we would simply leverage that convention.
• Potential for Growth – Is this just the first phase of implementing a commercial security solution for your organization? If so, we want to plan for future phases and the growth of your organization. Trying to develop this afterwards can be a nightmare!

Vince also goes on to explain, “A door could be named doors, access points, portals, etc. in your existing system. We help our customers rename them in a way that end users operating the system will be able to quickly identify the physical location of any door. Of course, with larger sites there is more complexity. We work with the end user to create a site-specific nomenclature that is typically composed of literal door numbering, but also acronyms to codify and differentiate the different locations.”

The overall recommendation from Vince is that door naming is a small but important detail when planning out your security system.

At Kenton Brothers, we have the experience of working closely with our customers and partners to design and implement customized commercial security solutions. Whether it’s time for you to plan and build out your first solution or update your existing security systems, give us a call. We would love to help you.

By Neal Bellamy, IT Director at Kenton Brothers

Do you know who is in your building? Do you know where everyone is located when they are in your building?

To help companies answer these questions, we use access control solutions. (As the name implies, these solutions control access to buildings.) When configuring these systems, we decide which people get into the building, which doors they can use and the times that they are able to open the door. Access cards are a key component of these systems.

Access Card Skimming Devices

There are reasons why you might want to increase security or safety by adding more features to your current access control system. Why? Copying and emulating an access card has become easier, due to new technology like a flipper zero and other skimming devices.

The best defense against copying a card is to use a card technology that has not yet been hacked. You also need to use encrypted communication between the reader and the control panel. (Both have been talked about before in my previous blogs). However, sometimes the upgrade path can take a long time to implement and/or be expensive depending on how large your system is and how old it is. Another way to guard against skimmers might be to ensure a card has only been used once to gain entry.

Anti-Passback

Anti-passback is the access control term when we want to prevent someone from entering a door and then passing back the card to another person, who then uses the card to enter. Most access control systems have that technology available. When this feature is enabled, you also know when a person is leaving the area. If you know when they are in the area and you know when they leave an area, then you also know where they shouldn’t appear in the building. In other words, if the cardholder is already in the building, you should not grant access to the building again.

The reason an employee might try to get into the building again is because they loaned their card out, or because it was copied. Anti-Passback also provides more safety. If an emergency happens, you also know who was in the building or area at the time of the event. If you don’t have Anti-Passback enabled, you might know that a person came in that morning, but would not know that they left for lunch or an appointment during a specific timeframe.

To build on this example, imagine a multi-building company or a company located across multiple cities. If someone badged into the downtown campus and has not badged out, then they can’t possibly be at the uptown office. If they were in the New York office at 8am, there is no way they could be badging into the L.A. office at 9am.

Anti-Tailgating

You can also define areas within areas. You might have a building perimeter, then a lab inside, and maybe even a hazardous storage area inside the lab. You can set the rules so that they cannot enter the storage area unless they are in the lab first; You can’t enter the lab until they are in the building; and so on. (This technically is called Anti-Tailgating, but goes hand-in-hand with Anti-Passback.)

There are a few reasons you might want to know in real-time who is in your building. Anti-Passback and Anti-Tailgating can improve security by only allowing one person to be in one place, improve safety by knowing that someone was in the building during an emergency, and even help you understand where in the building someone is located.

We are experts at solving hard problems, if you have a unique situation, please let us help.