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Physical Security
The Ins and Outs of Access Control at a Community College District
3/20/2008
When somebody joins the faculty or staff or departs, nobody needs to issue or retrieve physical keys. The access is controlled by the software. If the class moves from one building to another, the faculty member's access is handled by a change to the software.
Users--whether faculty or staff--use fobs or keycards to gain access. Hartney said each user has a choice, but almost everybody chooses the fob over the keycard. "We have a lot of people who are free thinkers," he said. "They don't want an ID card."
The access rights for each person are maintained in Microsoft Database Engine (MSDE) tables. (Microsoft SQL Server can also be used.) Those reside on a server that each campus has. Two additional servers are housed at the district offices where Hartney works. One is called the card handler client; the other is a global server. The global server handles communication to the individual campuses and acts as a backup server. It can take information from one campus and reroute it to another one.
It also allows Hartney to do centralized administration by remote management as if it were a local client. Weekly, the individual campus servers communicate to the global server, which does a backup. If communication is lost between the global server and the campus, users at the school can continue to operate, update the user database and do reprogramming of access rules.
Besides granting or denying access to a building, the software maintains a record of fob or keycard use. "As long as the building was not scheduled to be unlocked, we can see who has been going into that building via their fob," said Hartney. "If in middle of the night something has gone missing, we can look at the system and see if somebody has forced the door open or somebody has used a key fob. If they've used a key fob, then we know who to talk to."
The system can monitor and let users change the conditions of doors--whether a given door is opened, closed, locked or unlocked.
The system also handles alarm monitoring. If a door is forced open or a window is broken, that will set off an alarm. "I don't mean bells and sirens," said Hartney. "The system sees it as an 'event,' a problem--something happening out of the ordinary." The software will communicate with an offsite company that monitors the system 24 hours a day. That company will call the appropriate authority, depending on the type of event--whether security on campus or the local police department.
Video for Forensics
Video recording is set up in several areas that have the new access control hardware, but Hartney says it's not used for surveillance. Nobody is constantly monitoring the cameras. They're used for after-the-fact analysis, "to look back and determine who, what, where and when."
The cameras have buffer memory, which is constantly being recorded over, comparable to a Tivo device. When an event takes place, the software sends an alert to the hard drive to collect what has been recorded to the buffer. The contents of the recording can then be analyzed by a user to determine the seriousness of the event. "When we come in, we can see there was an alarm," explained Hartney. "We can look at the hard drive. We can see somebody walk up to the door. 'Oh, it's a custodian. He's using a key. Let's call him at home.'"
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