Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
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.'"
Recommended Reading
- Digital Arts Alliance Adds Fordham U
The Digital Arts Alliance, a consortium led by the Pearson Foundation that promotes digital arts in K-12 education, is expanding its membership with the addition of Fordham University. This follows on the heels of three other organizations joining the group back in July--the National Education Association (NEA) Foundation, the Foundation for Investor Education, and Employers For Education Excellence (E3).
- Payment Card Security Toughens with DSS 1.2 Release
Opinions are mixed on what the new Payment Card Industry (PCI) DSS 1.2 standard will mean for security pros going forward. However, the mandate is clear: protect data.
- 6 Universities Join NASA Astrobiology Institute
Research teams from six universities have been selected by NASA to become members of its Astrobiology Institute with the aim of exploring the "origins, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe." Teams were each awarded five-year grants, averaging $7 million each, according to NASA.
- Amazon To Host Microsoft Solutions in the Cloud
Amazon announced Wednesday that it is conducting a private beta test of Microsoft's server products running on Amazon's hosted computing platform, which is called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Amazon expects to offer companies the ability to run their applications on EC2 using Microsoft Windows Server or Microsoft SQL Server sometime in the fall, according to an announcement issued by the company.
- CRM Pushing into New Areas of Higher Ed
Implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) solution can require "difficult or even painful behavioral challenges" for administrators in higher education, according to Nicole Engelbert, a lead analyst with research and analysis firm Datamonitor. "It means re-orienting yourself to your students. That can be tough, so you need to be ready for that."
- Integrated Collaborative Environment Leverages Web 2.0
Here's a bit of trivia for your next high-tech happy hour: A "nog" (in addition to being a Christmas favorite) is a wooden block built into a masonry wall so that joinery structure can be nailed to it. For the founders of Piscataway, N.J.-based startup Bluenog this obscure bit of carpentry nomenclature was the perfect metaphor for an integrated software suite that includes a content management system (CMS), rich portal features and business intelligence (BI) capabilities.
