You may want only some people to enter certain areas. Whereas you’d like visitors and contractors to report to the reception desk on arrival. You may, for example, only want to allow automatic access to employees. It can be difficult to remember which key is for which door, but it’s too much of a security risk to label them.īy using an electronic access control system, you can avoid the downsides of using mechanical keys and also gain much more control. If someone needs to enter many different buildings and rooms, they’ll need a large number of keys, which are inconvenient to carry and use.

You can’t see if and when someone’s used a key, so you don’t know who’s entered or at what time. You then need to distribute new keys to everyone who needs access to that door. If someone loses a key, you need to replace the lock to make sure the lost key can’t be misused. Below are just some of the problems presented by using keys. Even for a small company, however, using mechanical keys has several flaws and limitations – especially as an organisation gets bigger. Mechanical keys are the simplest form of physical access control and the method many smaller organisations use. Why use an access control system instead of keys? And, as they’re capable of logging who accessed where and when, they can provide valuable data to help you track how your buildings and sites are being used. They typically use an identifier such as an access card to authorise people to enter certain areas. When we talk about a physical access control system, we’re usually referring to an electronic security system.

Including the improved efficiency of your business processes and site or building management. And, although one of its primary uses is to increase security, a physical access control system can offer many other benefits too. We tend to call it physical access control to differentiate it from access control that prevents people from entering virtual spaces – for example when logging into a computer network. The location they’re entering may be, for example, a site, a building, a room or a cabinet. The person entering may be an employee, a contractor or a visitor and they may be on foot, driving a vehicle or using another mode of transport. At a very basic level, access control is a means of controlling who enters a location and when.

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