Phyiscal Access Control Systems - Recommendations?
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I can no longer recommend a specific brand (too out of touch), but I can give a insight on types of devices and methodology.
First, all access control systems that you will want will be computer controlled because you want logging. There are self contained systems out there, but you lose the logging that you want. Those are nothing more than fancy locks with hundreds of keys. I would have to dive back into brands to say more on that subject.
All of these systems run on normal A/C power, but all also have standard sealed lead acid batteries to keep the control board running. This is standard. What many people do not properly plan is how to power the locking mechanism itself during a power outage.
For the locking mechanism, your have two basic choices:
Electric Door Strikes:
Maglocks:
Electric door strikes are the simplest and can be both fail safe as well as fail secure. By this I mean without power the unit can be lock or unlocked. Most are fail secure because it is the cheapest way to make them, and they only require power to become unlocked.
Maglocks on the other hand are never fail secure because a power failure means no power to run the electromagnet that secures everything. You can of course provide battery backup for this as I mentioned above.
Electric strikes can be considered by many as a poorer solution because they still rely on the normal doorknob tongue mechanic that a standard door has, retaining that weakness of being the only point to secure the door. With proper planning such as oversize shielding on the outside to prevent tampering, this is fairly cheaply overcome.
Maglocks have the benefit of being extremely hard to force. You will bend a steel door before breaking plate free of the maglock if it is properly installed. The biggest weakness of maglocks is that they can be defeated with a piece of paper folded in half and placed between the plate and the magnet. Of course, you would be hard pressed to stick a piece of paper that will not fall on the unit without being noticed in most places that actually care about their security.
The greatest weakness of all of these systems is usually the egress device. Very few people buy systems that you have to card to both enter and exit. Usually they secure the entrance and use a motion detector to cause an unlock to happen automatically when someone walks up to exit. You can defeat this by exhaling on a tissue and waving it under the door with a hanger. Your fancy glass double doors with the air gap between the doors makes this even more trivial.
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I would highly recommend a system that uses proximity cards because anything else is just a pain in the ass for users.
If some current system (recall I am 15 years out of touch on this) supports modern NFC standards, you may be able to have a phone app to allow entry. I assume this exists, but I have no idea.
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If you have a specific quesiton after that wall of info, just ask.
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@jaredbusch Thanks for the info. We currently have a mag lock on the front door integrated with intercom/phone system and you are definitely right about the power failure affecting the lock. The door is a push bar that raises a bolt inside the door and during business hours we have to set the push bar all the way in, which allows the mag lock to hold and release it. After-hours, someone has to manually set it to the out position and unlocking the mag lock won't even allow it to open and forcing someone to use a physical key.
So I don't know how we can log after-hours access when using the existing mag lock setup so we would have to see what else we could do.
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@jaredbusch said in Phyiscal Access Control Systems - Recommendations?:
I would highly recommend a system that uses proximity cards because anything else is just a pain in the ass for users.
If some current system (recall I am 15 years out of touch on this) supports modern NFC standards, you may be able to have a phone app to allow entry. I assume this exists, but I have no idea.
I did see some systems from HID that had mobile device access -
https://www.hidglobal.com/solutions/hid-mobile-access
