From wireless locks to the integration of authentication and access management, industry players tell us what trends they expect to see in the access control market in 2019.
Overall, the access control market has been slow to adopt the latest technological trends. One reason for this is that organizations do not update access control systems as regularly as they update other technologies, such as cell phones.
According to Gaoping Xiao, Director of Sales for APAC at AMAG Technology, traditional access control is still 10 years behind other sectors. Despite this, Xiao thinks rising awareness of the security benefits will see the market warm to newer technologies in 2019. "These newer technologies have more rigid regulations (and) in the next 12 to 18 months I think there will be a major uptick in people understanding that there is risk associated with legacy platforms, like using proximity cards or Mifare CSN cards in critical locations and updates in technology are needed to provide a safe environment.”
Jason Spielfogel, Director of Product Management at Identiv, expects to see an expansion in the use of of wireless locks. "Not only do wireless locks represent the marriage of reader and lock in the same hardware, but the ease in which a wireless lock deployment can be installed and made operational dwarfs the older, cabled methods of installing an access control system."
He added that the hospitality industry "moved in this direction several years ago," and now the main commercial and industrial segments were following. "Wireless locks also represent a way to establish fast, temporary access control environments that can just as quickly be uninstalled or moved to another location," Spielfogel said.
Francois Lasnier, SVP of Identity and Access Management at Gemalto, highlights the use of identity-based access control across a user journey in both the physical and digital as an interesting development.
Francois Lasnier,
SVP of Identity and Access Management,
Gemalto
"Instead of looking at each access transaction individually, with each access control system relying on disparate identity systems, global access control platforms feeding from various identity systems (e.g., AD for enterprise apps, physical access database, biometrics, etc.) and taking smart decisions based on global access policies using both physical and digital context information is something we could envision down the road," Lasnier said.
Lasnier also expects the integration of authentication and access management to gain momentum over the next few years. "Authentication will need to be integrated into access management more tightly in order to afford the risk mitigation organizations need, and in order to reduce the burden of logging into multiple apps for end users," he said.
"This is driven by an ever present need to provide access security at the application level, as a result of a continuously expanding threat surface and of an intensifying threat level. The expanding threat surface is the result of a hyper expansion of cloud- and web-based delivery, while the intensifying threat level is evident in the scope of the breaches in the past few years and its repercussions."
According to Vince Wenos, VP of Global Technology and Engineering at Allegion, other trends of interest this year include: the continued rise of IP-based network solutions as a challenge to traditional RS-485 architectures; continued demand for and adoption of cloud-hosted solutions over traditional on-premises solutions; increasing intelligence in "edge" devices due to improvements in power management and lower-cost computing; mobile access and its ability to drive further convergence of physical and logical security; the inclusion of advanced machine learning and AI; and biometrics.