If your business is like most, you’ve got a long list of security items to monitor each day. The coronavirus pandemic has only added to that list. While everyday security tends to involve protecting staff, visitors, and assets, COVID-19 security concerns put a sharp focus on the medical health of everyone who walks through your doors.
Suddenly, businesses everywhere are getting creative with ways to move staff, customers, and visitors through their doors while keeping them physically distanced and requiring them to touch as few surfaces as possible. Enhancing access control systems is a smart COVID-19 strategy that can help accomplish both of these things.
Touch-Free Entryways
The post-COVID-19 world is one that’s beginning to look different from the one we knew before. One of the differences people are noticing everywhere from bathrooms to crosswalks is touchless technology. Because some of the germiest surfaces in every business are door handles, they pose a significant potential exposure risk for anyone who enters or exits. Commercial properties are enhancing access control systems and modifying their entryways in a variety of different ways to enable touch-free entry.
Automatic doors: For newer properties or businesses with the ability to retrofit their doors, automatic doors allow easy entry without touching door handles. For secure entries, the addition of a key-card pad or biometric security will only allow authorized individuals to pass through.
Hands-free doors: Smaller businesses and older buildings may be tougher to retrofit with automatic doors. For these properties, there are a variety of hands-free options that eliminate high-touch door handles. Some business owners are installing foot-operated door handles, while others are opting for door pulls that can be hooked with an elbow and pulled open.
Automating Temperature Checks
With many states requiring temperature checks at specific businesses, this poses a new concern. What’s the best way to adhere to this policy while still keeping everyone distanced and moving them along to prevent a dangerous backup?
As businesses are enhancing access control systems, some are installing thermal camera technology that does a quick temperature check of anyone who passes through the doors. These include larger thermal camera systems that can scan multiple individuals at once as well as smaller digital temperature check kiosks that scan one person at a time. Temperature check technology can be integrated with a business’s overall security system, storing data, and sending notifications to management should someone have an elevated body temperature.
Enhancing Access Control Systems Inside Your Business
Commercial access control concerns don’t end once someone steps through your doors. In order to fully cover all COVID-19 health and security issues, it’s essential to take a look around your business and consider any item that multiple staff members must touch.
This includes security alarm panels that are armed and disarmed as a matter of opening and closing the business each day. DMP has upgraded its alarm panels, including touchless arming technology. Simply present a credential to the built-in reader and after the arming delay expires, the system will arm. Repeat the process to disarm the security system.
New policies have made life infinitely more complex for business owners across the country. Technology is moving fast to keep up, helping to make things more simple and straightforward as business procedures quickly change. Enhancing access control systems to note health data such as temperatures, allow entry without grabbing germ-laden door handles, and offer a touch-free way to arm and disarm security systems is one of the many ways business owners are pivoting quickly with the times in order to increase safety.
At ProTech Security, we have a strong history of experience, innovation, and customer service. The ProTech Security Advantage is more than 35 years of service in Northeast Ohio and a strong commitment to providing quality, cost-effective protection for homes, businesses, educational institutions, and government facilities. To see what ProTech Security can do for you, contact us today.
