What is Touchless Access Control?
Many enterprise and commercial real estate teams have insisted on using keypads or key cards as their primary means of accessing a building. However, in 2020, as concerns over COVID-19 began to grow, access control started to change. Some IT and security professionals began to adopt touchless access control solutions, including biometric scanners and mobile credentialing. Today, touchless access control solutions have become a necessity.
This article explains the five key elements that facilitate touchless access control and enhance the physical security of your building.
5 Key Elements for a Touchless Access Control Building
A range of factors helps IT and security teams facilitate contactless access control for their buildings. We’ve shortlisted the top factors enterprises, commercial real estate, healthcare and other teams should consider.
1. Cloud-Based Security Management System
Enterprises should choose cloud-based access control over on-premises for various reasons, including remote administration, automatic updates, scalability and customization. Moreover, cloud-based security systems can easily be integrated with your existing tech stack to further enhance your building security.
Access control is a technology that enables security administrators to monitor access activities, assign access credentials and add or remove users from any device, anywhere, at any time. It provides a global dashboard where security admins can monitor user activity, browse access alerts and bookmark key locations to display with a click of a button.
Genea Security gives users the ability to lock and unlock doors, view real-time access activities of users and monitor access logs for forced door access attempts and doors being held open.
2. Mobile Credentials
Mobile phones have become an integral part of our day-to-day personal and professional lives. Over 96% of millennials own and use mobile phones for both personal and work-related purposes. This makes it an ideal choice for businesses to enable their employees to use mobile phones to open gates and doors.
Mobile credentials are convenient, cost-effective and secure. They enable tenants, employees and visitors to just tap or twist their BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) or NFC-enabled (Near Field Communication) mobile devices in front of an access reader to open the doors of a facility. By storing access credentials in smartphones, the mobile access control eliminates the need for users to carry their key cards, key fobs and other access peripherals.
Genea Security offers a cloud-based mobile credentialing system that enables your admins to distribute access credentials to users with just a few clicks. Compatible with both NFC and BLE-enabled smartphones, it will enhance physical security in high-risk areas through multi-factor authentication (MFA).
Additionally, Genea Security integrates with Apple Wallet, so users can conveniently store their mobile key with digital credit and debit cards on their iPhone or Apple Watch.
The main benefits of the Genea Security, include:
- Higher user convenience
- Reduced chances for credentials being stolen
- Simple setup for provisioning and deprovisioning mobile credentials
3. Visitor Management System
Visitor management systems (VMS) streamline the access activities of guests throughout the premises. It allows businesses to streamline pre-meeting protocols and guest registrations, organize audit trails and improve the visitor experience.
Genea offers a touchless visitor management system that simplifies how you manage your visitors. It helps users preregister their guests through a mobile app and distributes a QR or barcode that acts as an access pass before arriving.
It enables security admins to provide role-based and rule-based custom access permissions for visitors based on attributes such as the purpose of visit, person to visit, type of visitor and more. These custom access permissions restrict visitors from accessing high-risk areas such as board rooms, server rooms, and electricity rooms.
4. Destination Dispatch for Touchless Elevator Access
The main objectives of facilities managers responsible for elevator access control at commercial real estate properties are to:
- Reduce wait waiting times
- Increase elevator hygiene
- Restrict unauthorized users from accessing specific floors of the building
The only way they can achieve these objectives is to adopt destination dispatch technology.
Destination dispatch is an elevator traffic optimization technique that sends all passengers heading to a particular floor in the same elevator car. This technique allows passengers to request an elevator car to a particular floor from the elevator lobby itself. To make a request, they only need to present their proximity cards or mobile credentials to card readers installed in the lobby. By eliminating the need for users to touch elevator buttons to ascend and descend the elevator car, this technique facilitates touchless entry to elevators.
Having cloud-based access control that can integrate with the destination dispatch technologies will help you streamline the elevator operations for your property. For instance, Genea’s cloud-based access control can be integrated with destination dispatch technologies such as OTIS Compass 360 and Schindler PORT to provide seamless elevator access to all users.
5. Educating Users, Tenants and Employees
Regardless of the technology you implement, it may not provide desired results if your users don’t embrace it with an open mind. This is why educating users is a key element in facilitating touchless access control. Make sure to educate your tenants, users and employees about the importance of touch-free access control and how it enhances their health and well-being.
Workplaces should make touchless access control policies a part of their organizational culture. Facilities teams can send periodic emails and put up brochures on notice boards explaining the importance of touchless access control and highlighting the recent changes in the policies. This helps users acknowledge the enterprise’s endeavors toward making their workplaces safe and secure.
Upgrade Your Building with Genea’s Touchless Access Control System
Touchless access control is a must-have technology for businesses and commercial properties that prioritize physical security and user convenience.
Genea offers a range of touchless access control solutions, including cloud-based access control, mobile access control and visitor management that help streamline your physical access control operations.
With the experience of serving over 4,500 companies across various sectors, including corporate real estate properties, healthcare systems, global enterprises, educational institutions and more, Genea can help you closely monitor user access at multiple locations from a centralized dashboard.
Leaders across industries trust Genea for the following reasons:
- 24/7/365 live customer support
- New product features are released every quarter
- 98% customer retention rate
- Seamless integration with the existing tech stack with simple API tokens
- Non-proprietary hardware.
Book a demo to learn how touchless technologies from Genea can upgrade your building’s security.
