With $500B+ flowing into AI infrastructure, operators need systems that were kept separate for decades to finally work together
Acre Security, a global leader in physical security solutions, today announced the general availability of its integration between its Acre Intrusion controller family (EVO, Gen1, AIC-1200) and Acre Access Control (AAC). The integration connects access and intrusion into one governed workflow, reducing duplicated user and access credential management and cross-system administration.
Acre Intrusion Controller (AIC) is a proven platform across Europe, while AAC continues to gain momentum in North America as organizations modernize their security environments.
The announcement comes as critical infrastructure operators are being urged to tighten insider-threat programs and improve offboarding. CISA and other U.S. bodies have continued to publish guidance that frames insider threat as a cross-functional operational program, not a single-team policy, with HR, IT, and security working from shared processes. In practice, that means offboarding cannot depend on two separate systems staying in sync.
Acre’s AIC–AAC integration is built for that reality, helping prevent a common problem – two separate systems drifting out of sync and leaving old permissions behind after someone changes roles or leaves.
Access control and intrusion detection evolved independently, as they solve different problems: access control is permissive (managing who can enter and when). Intrusion detection is detective (monitoring for unauthorized presence and triggering alarms). Access control is standardized around Wiegand and OSDP protocols for reader-to-controller communication. Intrusion systems used proprietary panel protocols and industry standard reporting protocols for central station monitoring. The vendor ecosystems were equally siloed, with different trade associations, installer certifications, and sales channels.
Inside enterprises, these systems are often reported to different buyers. Facilities management might own the burglar alarm because it is tied into building management. The security director or IT owned access control because it touched employee credentials and identity systems. That split creates operational gaps during moments that matter most, especially employee exits and access changes, where timing, traceability, and clean revocation are critical.
Cloud architecture eliminated the protocol barrier. When both systems run on the same cloud infrastructure, they can share a common data layer regardless of the protocols the field hardware uses. The translation happens at the edge; the intelligence lives in one place. Today’s threat landscape requires a coordinated response, as security operations centers receive high volumes of alerts daily, many of which are false positives. Correlating events across systems helps stretched teams separate signal from noise.
"Organizations today face an increasingly complex threat landscape while managing more systems and more data than ever before," said Kumar Sokka, CEO of Acre Security. “We are not claiming to be first to ‘unify’ security tools. The difference is what we mean by unification: identity, policy, and audit that hold up during offboarding and incident response. This release is a step in our One Acre journey to give security teams operational clarity by unifying access and intrusion detection on a single, governed platform.
The integration arrives as data center operators face unprecedented security demands due to the race to build AI infrastructure at a historic scale.
These facilities have become high-value targets. IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that the US average cost of a physical security breach was $10.22 million. As data centers house the compute power behind AI training and inference, operators require security architectures that treat access control and intrusion detection as a unified system.
Other vendors often deliver “unification” by integrating separate products through partnerships and connectors. Acre’s approach is different because both the access control and intrusion systems are Acre platforms. That allows unification at the governance layer: one person profile, consistent permissions, and a single record of changes across both systems, instead of two databases trying to stay in sync.
This means a single cardholder profile governs both access permissions and intrusion arming rights. When HR terminates an employee, one action revokes both door access and alarm codes, without sync delays or orphaned credentials in a secondary system.
Exception days, holiday calendars, and scheduling rules apply across both systems from a single configuration.
The platform presents security‑related information in a single dashboard with a unified alarm and event history. For example, an intrusion alert and a door‑forced‑open alert are displayed within the same application for faster event and alarm verification, rather than appearing in separate applications that require manual correlation.
Cloud-native architecture with Acre’s proprietary FlexC bi-directional encrypted communication protocol means no on-premises translation servers, no integration appliances, no additional points of failure between systems.
The AIC-AAC integration is available now in EMEA and APAC.
Product Adopted:Others