Future-proofed physical access control helps campus administrators provide improved campus security coupled with convenience to students and staff

By Gustavo Gassmann, HID Vice President of Emerging Markets, PACS

With an estimated 13.2m students and thousands of faculty members entering and exiting South African campus buildings at any time, university administrators must be fastidious about security, especially in today’s rapidly evolving technological environment.

Modern campuses typically have centralised management and control of security systems and procedures, as well as risk-management strategies that include identification, assessment and monitoring of threats.

This is especially important as the country’s tertiary institutions have on occasion been the epicentre of protest action. Some of that was peaceful. Some has led to large-scale vandalism, destruction of property and disruption to teaching and learning.

As the first line of defence against intruders and unauthorized access, access control systems must be well understood and deployed.

But with new technologies coming to the market and user expectations changing, mobile access control has quickly gained traction in recent years for its convenience, flexibility and enhanced security features.

During the pandemic, campuses with a future-safe physical access control systems (PACS) infrastructure demonstrated how important it is to quickly add capabilities that improve resilience and adaptability.

One international case study is the Les Roches Hospitality School in Spain, where mobile IDs for “touchless” access control eliminated badge and ID card issuance touchpoints and contact with cards, readers or keypads, while elevating the student experience.

An example: When students come to study at the Les Roches Marbella campus, they are not just attending one of the world’s leading hospitality business schools, they are also enveloped in extraordinary innovation and sophisticated living to mirror the exceptional experiences they are being trained on.

Les Roches houses more than 1,000 students from around the world in a real-life training site that offers hands-on experience. With a legacy card-based system, the students and faculty needed to have with their badges at all times to validate themselves.

Supporting administrators’ quest for digital transformation, as part of the school’s Spark incubator program, the school’s leadership team wanted this system to be replaced with a mobile credentials-based system where plastic access cards would be replaced by digital IDs on a smartphone.

This would serve as the verification for daily physical access and digital touchpoints, including building access, vending machines and restaurant reservations. It would also allow the school to steer digital transformation and student efficiencies throughout its security and administrative functions.

The solution should provide the following benefits:

• Swift granting and removal of access
• Avoiding disruption when students lose or forget cards
• Accommodating a multisystem environment
• Promoting administrative efficiencies such as new student registration

Management also wanted to drive improvements through back-office processes and procedures to save time and resources, while enhancing everyday life on campus through modern technology. One of the most pressing factors for this particular mobile initiative was to achieve higher efficiency around the school’s new student intake registration or check-in process each semester, because loading ID credentials individually onto RFID cards, then printing each of the 1,000-plus cards, meant corrections along the way were inevitable.

Considerations: the mobile technology needed to support both Android and iOS phones, as well as physical card technology.

The solution that emerged comprised a robust mobile ecosystem with more than 40 access points featuring mobile identification, app, portal and reader technologies.

More importantly, because the solution is built on open standards-based technology where software upgrades can be securely managed through the cloud, it has the ability to integrate with existing security platforms as well as support future technologies. It points to a future where access can be meticulously controlled without compromising convenience, and that is likely to sit as well with South Africa’s tertiary education sector as it has elsewhere in the world.