Johannesburg - With an estimated 13.2m students and thousands of faculty members entering and exiting South Africa’s campus buildings , university administrators must address security meticulously, especially in today’s rapidly evolving technology 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 and vulnerabilities.
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 have led to large-scale vandalism, destruction of property and disruption to teaching and learning.
As the first line of defence against intruders and unauthorised access, access control systems are 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. In fact, in HID’s 2022 State of Access Control Report,42% of respondents indicate plans to upgrade to mobile-ready systems. About 17% of respondents are in the education sector.
During the pandemic, campuses with a future-safe PACS infrastructure demonstrated how important it is to quickly add capabilities that improve resilience and adaptability. An example is 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.
For 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 an authentic, 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.
To ensure Les Roches continues to be seen as a model campus when it comes to exemplary learning based on cutting-edge technologies, administrators saw the need to evolve its mobile ecosystem.
Supporting their quest for digital transformation, as part of the school’s Spark incubator program, the leadership team wanted to migrate to 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 (e.g., building access, vending machines, restaurant reservations, etc.). This effort 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 multi-system 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.
The transition to mobile didn’t come without a series of obstacles and serious consideration.
Each touchpoint where a card was to be replaced with smartphone technology required deep analysis and complex integration work—specifically involving seven to eight different brands whose products were already deployed throughout the premises (e.g., printers, vending machines, security technologies, door access, laundry facilities, parking garages and more).
Les Roches did not want to worry about a rip-and-replace hardware upgrade and wanted all improvements to be implemented incrementally. Additionally, the mobile technology needed to support both Android and iOS phones, as well as physical card technology (the RFID ecosystem would remain intact for non-student purposes and serve as a migration path for other areas not yet mobile).
The solution comprised in a robust mobile ecosystem with 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.