Ah, combination locks. We’ve been using them since grade school. They’re good to secure lockers against a snooping classmate, but are they enough access control to secure important documentation or valuables in your business? If not, how can we upgrade them to ensure that they are?
Mechanical Combination Locks
Combination locks fall into a few different categories. Let’s take mechanical combination locks first. These are more expensive to install than a simple lock and key, but they’re ultimately simple and still pretty inexpensive to install. They’re suitable for non-crucial personal items, things you could lose without it becoming a stressful business or personal situation.
Mechanical combination locks also mean you can share a code with someone else and they can have immediate access – there’s no stress or cost of copying a key for them. Unfortunately, this also means they can share the combination with anybody and this stranger has immediate access, too. That’s not ideal.
Electronic Combination Locks
A simple upgrade is to use electronic combination locks. This form of access control is more costly, but still reasonable. The advantage here is that electronic combination locks can have multiple combinations for multiple people. By automatically logging this, you can easily track down any theft by knowing which person’s combination was used to access the combination.
This lets you know who stole from you or shared their combination with someone who was unauthorized. It’s a simple solution that adds modern security to an age-old access control system.
Electronic Keycard Locks
Better still is keycard access. This lets you know exactly who accessed a building, room, or safe and when. Unlike a combination, if a card is lost or stolen, you can de-activate the old one. Then you can simply issue and activate a new one. The old one won’t work any longer, and you know whose hands you placed the new one into.
Keycard access is a form of physical access control that adds direct accountability into the equation. It’s not much more costly than electronic combination locks, they’re easier to maintain, and they add an extra layer of security.