Technology & Trends - Access control software

Enterprise security directors often count on an integration firm to handle jobs ranging from day-to-day activities to long-term, technology-laden projects. However, before entering a relationship, you must know what's reasonable to expect from an integrator – as not all are created equal. Here are some tips that might make the selection process easier. Completing comprehensive classwork An integrator's experience working in an enterprise environment is an obvious consideration. Ideally...

Organizations have shifted business focus countless times since the onset of the pandemic. While many leaders have been primarily concerned with the immediate health and safety of their customers and employees, 2022 has given rise to a new trend: More than ever, business leaders are seeking security solutions that increase operational efficiency and cost savings as well as improve logistics and business insight. As working environments become more complex, organizations looking to drive higher...

Many people, quite correctly, point to Salesforce.com—which launched in February of 2000—as the first example of cloud computing. In the years following, the term ‘cloud’ became so popular and was applied to so many products and service offerings, that it became almost meaningless. The result was cloud confusion in the business world and in the media. In one stark example from 2008, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison described news stories about cloud as, ‘complete gibberis...

We must leverage existing technologies like social media monitoring, gunshot and weapons detection, and real-time watchlist alerting. We owe it to our children. The recent news of the Dallas elementary school shooting absolutely gutted me. It’s a tragic and incomprehensible loss of life. A question I hear being asked again and again – could technology have made a difference? From my experience, modern technologies can help schools mitigate some of the damage and provide an early w...

Currently and unfortunately, there is no such thing as Cloud Police. If there were, two-thirds or more of the companies using ‘cloud’ in their advertising and documentation would be in Cloud Jail for seriously misusing the word in their marketing. The term ‘Cloud’ is over-used and misused—sometimes intentionally and knowingly, but also often in ignorance. It’s just a word—but in the context of cloud computing technology, it does have a specific meaning...

The world around us is full of technological innovation. Smart locks are commonplace in our homes and control access to buildings, but when it comes to industrial locking and access control for equipment cabinetry, options can seem limited. Equally, there’s not enough accessible information to act as a guide. The development of new technologies and cabinet capabilities feels as though it is being held back. But that doesn’t have to be the case. Common problems are seen across the l...

Trevor Dearing, the EMEA Director of Critical Infrastructure Solutions at Illumio, said “It is encouraging to see NIST releasing updated guidance acknowledging the increase in cyber-attacks targeting the supply chain and the consequent necessity to bolster the supply chain’s cyber security. We can no longer turn a blind eye to the exponential increase in attacks on the IT systems of manufacturers, logistics companies and organizations, which ultimately target the operational part of...

One key aspect of hardware design is choosing an appropriate form factor for your product. In today's world, form factor not only defines your product's size and shape but also includes its aesthetic appeal. While size and shape are important, another aspect that is prominent when dealing with RFID card readers (including NFC and BLE mobile credential readers) is the reader's location within the end device and the size of the RF antenna. This article focuses on some key considerations relating...

With increasing security and public health concerns, contactless credentials are gaining more and more importance. Contactless credentials can be divided into two main categories: soft credentials that include mobile phone applications that tap into their BLE/NFC hardware and transmit the data, and hard credentials that typically include low frequency (125 kHz) and high frequency (13.56MHz) based passive RFID transponders. With the help of these credentials, organizations can tackle safety conc...

Every day, millions of people worldwide use their personal credentials to prove their identity and access a range of services, from databases in their workplace to the banking app on their smartphone. But while this ensures only authorized people have access to certain systems, the use of this personal data opens users up to cyber risks, primarily in the form of identity theft. On Identity Management Day, Source Security spoke to seven IT and cybersecurity experts to discuss their experiences a...

Most individuals have strong opinions about what is more essential to our civilization: personal privacy or security. After more than a decade of technology enabling greater and greater amounts of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and data harvesting, now the pendulum is swinging towards a society that places more emphasis on individual rights and privacies. This shift is manifesting in a variety of ways, quickly changing the technology, security and cyber security landscapes, and requi...

Software as a Service (SaaS) provides computer equipment, OS, and software customized to the user’s purposes as a service. Access control can work in the same way. If you work in the physical security industry, especially concerning access control, you have probably heard about the term ‘ACaaS’ recently. ACaaS is a combination of ‘access control’ and ‘SaaS’ (Software as a Service). From a semantic point of view, ACaaS means providing cloud-based access c...

Technology continues to transform the physical security industry, helping companies become more aware of the full spectrum of risks their organization faces. Our new survey provides strong evidence that the use of these tools is solving some problems, but their implementation may create new challenges. In our 2022 State of Protective Intelligence Report, 93% of respondents said their company was actively adopting new threat intelligence, monitoring and alerting solutions for physical security,...

Most of the assumptions you’ve made about gunshot detection could be wrong. To those security professionals who stay on top of their homework, this is probably not true, but the ‘you’ in this context is directed to the collective security industry reader that, when looking into indoor gunshot detection products, sees terms like concussive force, percussion, or shockwave and wonders if these are important differentiators – or something the marketing department decided woul...

This is an era of digital revolution and with it comes dozens of new security dangers. Every gadget, from our smartphones to our security cameras, need some kind of protection from external hacking. However, how can we assure the safety of our devices, workplaces, etc.? Biometric security is one such security method that has emerged, since it is both efficient and perceived foolproof. It offers an additional layer of security for businesses and personal security systems. Biometric security syste...

Access control for buildings is nothing new. Early forms of security access for business security systems were introduced in the 1960s, as business owners and managers looked for alternatives to keys, as a result of needing to frequently replace them, when there was a change in personnel. It’s only in recent years that the urgency to implement smarter, more efficient, and convenient forms of access control has increased, in the context of public and private sector digital transformation....

Fingerprint biometrics is hugely relevant in the current landscape. Even amidst other newer developments, fingerprint authentication provides convenience and affordability. There are talks rife about how the coronavirus pandemic has changed the outlook towards fingerprint biometrics. What is currently the most used authentication technology is being speculated to be unsafe, when compared to other touchless biometrics and that its usage in the future would decrease significantly. However, the adv...

COVID-19 has undoubtedly impacted all industries, leaving its mark for years to come. Multiple lockdowns forced businesses across multiple sectors to reassess the way they worked, with many adapting to working from home due to the various stay-at-home orders. Data from a 2021 ONS survey revealed that 25.7 percent of the UK workforce, or 8.4 million people, worked from home during the pandemic, more than doubling the 2019 figure of 12.4 percent. A further nine million people were placed on furlo...

As a result of COVID-19, artificial intelligence (AI) has become table stakes for factories. Google’s 2021 Cloud Manufacturing Report found that 76% of manufacturing executives increased their adoption of disruptive technologies, including AI, during the pandemic. AI-based facial recognition technology AI has long been used in the sector to monitor the pace of work and anticipate machine failures, a trend that is expected to continue this year as factories look to optimize operations. Ho...

Corporate global security operations centers (GSOCs) bear the responsibility for protecting C-suite executives from physical and reputational harm amid social upheaval, extreme weather events, and escalating cyber threats. That mission, daunting as it is, becomes more difficult when GSOCs lack the data necessary for conducting a comprehensive threat assessment. Threat intelligence Unfortunately, many centers never move past basic threat intelligence which focuses on scenario-driven queries suc...

Business owners know the security of their properties is one of their most important daily concerns, and that leads many of them to work with professional security integrators who can design and deliver robust systems that provide protection and peace-of-mind through modern technologies and services. That’s why security integrators, by their very nature, have an invaluable tool that can be leveraged into bigger jobs: clients’ trust. As highly-trusted partners with extensive experien...

As we enter into 2022, there is still a level of uncertainty in place. It’s unclear what the future holds, as companies around the world still contend with the COVID-19 pandemic. Remote working has been encouraged by most organizations and the move to a hybrid working system has become ‘business as usual’, for the majority of businesses. Some have reduced their office space or done away with their locations altogether. Following best security practices With all this change in...

Cloud-based applications and platforms revolutionize supply chain management, helping stakeholders scale operations from small businesses to complex enterprises. Cloud supply chain solutions are showing significant increases in implementation – so much so the sheer number of organizations with a cloud solution outpace or far outnumbers the ones that don't. But there is one area that has still not made the switch to the cloud, most often the security department. But the advent of using vid...

In the new era of work, our relationship with the workplace is defined by flexibility and mobility. Employees are working across the home, office, and blended spaces more than ever before, as well as working varied hours to suit the modern work schedule.  This new hybrid workforce model holds the potential for more diverse talent and better productivity, but it also comes with its challenges – one being how to ensure security, health, and safety in the workplace.  Strong a...

Metal theft is nothing new, but the impact of the pandemic has left many in financial uncertainty, couple this with the rising price of metal, and one result is an increase in the level of acquisitive crime. It seems there is no limit to the types of materials stolen. Just recently, lead stolen from church roofs has caught the media’s attention again, but this type of theft reaches to more commonplace materials too, including steel, cast iron, and aluminum, and even items like street sign...

In the field of access control, face recognition has come a long way. Once considered too slow to authenticate people's identities and credentials in high traffic conditions, face recognition technology has evolved to become one of the quickest, most effective access control identity authentication solutions across all industries. Advancements in artificial intelligence and advanced neural network (ANN) technology from industry leaders like Intel have improved the accuracy and efficiency of fa...

As anti-fraud company Revector marks 20 years of operating, CEO and Founder Andy Gent believes that telecommunications fraud is still not high enough on the corporate agenda for network operators – this should be a significant concern to shareholders.  In 2001, Revector was launched to combat specific fraudulent activity against mobile network operators. The company’s management expected the business to have a shelf life of no more than five years – such as the belief tha...

While the foundation of autonomous retail has been built up over the past few years, it is only now that retailers are beginning to fully experiment with the technology. There were an estimated 350 stores globally in 2018 offering a fully autonomous checkout process, yet this number is forecast to increase dramatically with 10,000 stores anticipated by 2024. This acceleration in the growth of unmanned retail stores has, in part, been boosted by the COVID-19 pandemic and a demand for a more cont...

Gregor Schlechtriem has worked in the access control market for over 20 years and is now responsible for the Access & Intrusion Business Unit at Bosch Building Technologies. In this interview, the expert talks about key industry trends, the impact of the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic, technical innovations and his company’s strategy. Mr. Schlechtriem, you have many years of experience in the security technology market. What is your background and what are your responsibilities as Se...

More than a year and a half after the COVID-19 pandemic began, countless workers are still doing their jobs remotely rather than from their offices. While there are many positives to working from home, there can also be some negatives at play like nefarious actors taking advantage of the tools and connections that employees use in work from home environments. Insider threats, a security risk that comes from within the organization, are posing a major security problem for businesses. This is pa...