White Paper: Access Control Industry Best Practices

Recent questions have been raised about the vulnerabilities of physical access control systems. Unfortunately, some critics, with limited familiarity of the security industry, have oversimplified the tradeoffs between convenience and security of access control systems. Some have actually sensationalized these accounts and even worse, some have not presented the facts in an accurate manner.

One positive benefit of this is to increase the awareness of the need for a set of "Best Practices" to mitigate the risks of some of these "theoretical" attacks. This article will focus on the best practices that should be followed when choosing and installing access control readers. The audience for this article includes system integrators, consultants, architects and engineers and the end-users of access control systems.

The most important concept to embrace in adopting best practices is that an effective security system uses "layered security." Simply put, this involves using additional safeguards to make sure that a security failure at one point will be detected at a successive point. For example, a home protected by a burglar alarm might use both glass break detectors and motion detectors to detect when an intruder gains illicit entry through a window instead of a door.