Office Building Access Control Systems

By: Gary Terrazas

Many businesses and other organizations are installing increasingly sophisticated office building access control systems. And its not hard to see why. For one, the office building is usually home to the organization’s computer server, on which the organization stores vital information and runs its website. And in today’s knowledge-driven economies, many organizations’ competitive advantage lies in their accumulated body of knowledge, which they then have to guard jealously. With the growth of e-commerce, many businesses make the bulk of their sales online, and unauthorized malicious access to their office buildings could eventually lead to sabotage of their websites, resulting in heavy losses.

Moreover, the office building also acts as storage for many vital documents like land titles, car logbooks and other important certificates, all of which carry serious legal implications, and most of which carry the potential for fraudulent use. This is more alarming with the recent growth of organized crime syndicates. To ensure the safety of all these resources, many organizations find investment in office building access control systems justified and worthwhile.

Access control systems vary in sophistication and effectiveness. At the most basic level, there is the manual access control system, which is essentially the employment of personnel (such as guards) to control access to a building or other resource. As an office building access control system, manual access control works well where the threat is not too sophisticated, or where not too much is at stake. Then there are mechanical access control systems, effected through devices such as padlocks and car barrier, which may be automated to varying degrees. And while these are potentially more effective than manual access control systems, with the recent advances in fabrication and other mechanical engineering technologies, there are relatively easy ways to circumvent mechanical access control systems. Finally, there is electronic access control system.

Electronic access control systems are based on cutting edge electronics technology, and when properly designed and implemented, have proven hard to crack, even for the most determined saboteurs. This is especially true with a class of electronic access control systems called biometric access control systems. As office building access control systems, biometric access control systems determine who is to be authorized to enter and who is to be denied entry to the office building based on biometric data such as one’s fingerprints, voice or face – and this data is virtually unpassable, making biometric access control systems highly effective. Other forms of electronic access control systems include smart cards and PIN systems, both of which are also high effective but with a catch – as long as they don’t get into th wrong hands.

An added advantage with most office building access control systems is that they can also serve as office-hour clocking systems and virtual employee registers, thus minimizing cases of wage disputes. This could save the organization large sums of money it could have otherwise lost in fraudulent wage claims. And as a virtual employee register, the office building access control system also has the potential to dramatically improve the human resource management function of the organization by keeping a reliable (and incontestable) database of attendance patterns.

Reference Source: http://www.articlesnatch.com/Article/Office-Building-Access-Control-Systems/437181