The best ways to strengthen access control on campus

Access control technology has evolved a lot over the last decade. And so have the needs of colleges and universities.

It’s not enough to secure doors and buildings. Today’s higher education security professionals are looking for ways to streamline the flow of people across campuses, gain better control over cardholder management, and become more adaptable to changing health mandates.

They’re also thinking more about how their legacy access control could be exposing their school to cybersecurity risks. And what tools are available to better protect student and staff privacy.

Higher education is ready for modern access control

In a recent survey 67% of organization stated they want to invest in access control technology this year.

For colleges and universities specifically, the COVID pandemic highlighted the limitations of their legacy access control systems. While many tried to adapt to new health mandates, the technologies they once relied on to keep facilities secure weren’t designed to address these new challenges.

Having many disjointed and proprietary systems across facilities made it impossible to accurately track occupancy levels and remotely manage door schedules and cardholder rights. Older proximity cards and readers not only created health concerns but also increased cybersecurity risks.

Choosing an open and scalable access control system is critical

Here’s the good news for campuses and universities: upgrading to newer access control systems doesn’t have to happen all at once. When you select an open-architecture access control system, you’ll be able to keep some existing technologies and phase in new devices, readers, or card technologies over time.

This means your team gets access to newer tools and functionality within the software and you’re able to spread out the upgrade costs over a few years. Following that, you can then think about adding mobile credentials, biometrics, and touchless readers to reduce touchpoints on campus and make it easier for everyone to move around safely.

In a recent Q&A with Matt Isgur from MIT, he shared the following about a recent access control migration: “One of the most enticing factors to moving to Genetec was that the Synergis™ access control system is not proprietary. This meant we could choose open-standard Mercury access control hardware, and worst-case scenario, we could always switch out the head-end platform without going through another full rip and replace. This decreased the risk involved with such a large and significant change.”

Choosing a highly-scalable system is equally important because it allows you to convert one system, facility, or campus at a time. You can also pilot new solutions before full-scale deployment and have greater confidence in your system over the long haul. That’s because you’ll know it can accommodate your growth from hundreds to thousands of devices and cardholders.

Boost efficiencies with a smarter physical access management solution

Once you’ve modernized the foundation of your access control system, you can start looking at other ways to enhance your processes. For example, investing in a smarter physical access management solution such as ClearID™ can help you streamline workflows and automate your access control requests.

Instead of manually enrolling new cardholders, the ClearID system will automatically assign access rights based on roles, attributes, departments, or specific school policies. This frees up a lot of time for operators and minimizes human error. If policies change, operators can simply update privileges, so that it’s applied across all associated cardholders.