Physical Security & Surveillance
Access Control
Card, PIN, mobile and biometric access, with door controllers wired to fail in the direction life safety requires and an audit trail that lines up with the footage.
Access control is a life-safety system before it is a security system. Every controlled door has to fail in the correct direction — fail-safe or fail-secure — and that decision is dictated by the escape route, the fire strategy and Civil Defense requirements, not by what the lock happens to support. A door specified the wrong way either traps people during a fire or unlocks the building in a power cut.
Past that, the value of the system is its record. Every presentation of a credential, every grant and every denial is logged; and if the controllers share a time source with the recorder, that log and the footage line up. Where they do not, an investigation becomes an exercise in working out which clock was right.
SOT specifies readers, controllers, locking hardware, power supplies and egress devices as one design, and configures door groups, schedules and permissions at commissioning — rather than leaving site with everything set to allow-all and a note to tidy it up later.
What this covers
Credentials
MIFARE DESFire and other encrypted card technologies, PIN, mobile credentials over Bluetooth or NFC, and biometrics where a credential that can be handed to somebody else is not acceptable.
Door controllers and locking hardware
Controllers, maglocks, electric strikes, drop bolts and turnstiles, with the power supplies, batteries and break-glass units that make a door behave correctly under fault.
Anti-passback and interlocks
Mantraps, airlocks and anti-passback rules for areas where one credential must not be able to admit two people.
Visitor management
Pre-registration, temporary credentials that expire on their own, and a record of who was on site and when.
Fire alarm interface
A hard-wired release from the fire panel, so egress doors unlock on alarm regardless of what state the software is in.
What we will ask you
These are the questions that decide the specification. Having the answers ready is what turns a first conversation into a real quotation.
- 01
Which doors sit on an escape route?
Those doors are fail-safe and interfaced to the fire panel. Getting this list right at design stage is the single most consequential decision in the system.
- 02
Card, mobile or biometric?
Cards get lent and lost, mobile credentials need a managed device policy, and biometrics carry an enrolment and data-handling obligation. Most sites end up with a mix, decided area by area.
- 03
Who administers it after handover?
Adding and revoking users is a daily task. Where nobody owns it, permissions accumulate and the audit trail stops meaning anything within about a year.