Lee Copland, Managing Director, Maxxess EMEA

Ongoing supply issues are still affecting the availability of access cards, with reported waiting times of several months for some customers. This is a reminder of the need for resilience in security systems.

Some organisations I speak to are having to eek out their remaining stock of cards. Others are improvising access measures while they wait for their orders to come through, with up to 300% price increases.

It can be done, but it’s not an ideal situation – especially if you’ve invested substantial sums in an access control systems that is, after all, part of the ‘shopfront’ that you present to the world. As a first point of contact for your visitors and your staff, you want it to be working smoothly.

And, of course, uninterrupted security is non-negotiable.

Five years ago, this potential vulnerability would not have figured highly on the risk registers of most managers. But fast-forward to 2023, and perspectives have changed.

We see how easy it is for global trading systems to be disrupted, and how potentially vulnerable are those seamless supply channels that we took for granted.

Resilience against unpredictable supply problems is just one of the benefits of cardless access solutions that use technologies such as biometrics, embedded BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) on smartphones, or QR codes.

Another important advantage is a lower environmental impact. Waste is reduced by eliminating traditional PVC cards, especially single-use ID badges for visitors.

Just as perceptions around supply chain security have changed in a short time, we are seeing new environmental policies emerge alongside a wider focus on sustainability. The world where we use and throw away plastic without thinking about it is already starting to end. Just as paperless offices are now the norm, we will soon take for granted working environments where all forms of waste are ruled out, partly as a result of growing legislative pressure and partly because of an attitude shift in the population.

Other advantages of touchless biometrics include efficiency, cost, functionality, and security. The most time-consuming aspect managing access control is the need for security teams to enrol and issue staff and contractors with ID cards.

We’ve seen all these benefits come into play on a major project in the Middle East recently, with one of the region’s foremost public authorities implementing a touchless and frictionless facial recognition access control solution leveraging SAFR SCAN technology from RealNetworks®, integrated into our eFusion platform.

As a cardless solution, it enables secure, self-enrolment from remote workstations and devices, removing the need for individuals to visit a security desk or to queue at reception. That’s a double efficiency saving, making life easier for the individual and reducing the administration burden for the organisation’s security and reception team.

It has reduced time, expense, waste, and the security risk of lost or stolen cards.

This was a significant project, with more than a hundred facial recognition readers located across the site, internally and externally. One of the great things about today’s facial recognition technology is that its accuracy is extremely high. It works in situations that earlier systems found challenging, including in bright or variable lighting conditions, in harsh weather environments, and is situations where there is background activity.

Today’s readers are also fast, being able to authenticate up to thirty individual identities each minute and have a user capacity of up to 50,000. And of course, with our eFusion platform these solutions can now be easily integrated for single-platform operation of multiple systems, including video surveillance, fire, intruder, and other security, safety and site-specific applications and hardware.

In the case of this project, more than four hundred surveillance cameras, and a popular enterprise-level VMS are operated from the same platform. And looking ahead, the customer is looking to introducing dual authentication, delivering further layers of security in addition to facial recognition.

I have been struck by the vision and technical ambition of the organisations adopting these integrated access solutions using biometrics. The fact that they want better, and more efficient infrastructure is not just by chance but because it aligns with their corporate values and vision.

Scratch the surface and you find that a frictionless access control approach aligns with other future-facing investments running through the whole organisation.