SURVEILLANCE
A smart guide to access control cards
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How you can benefit from Smart card technology without being tied to one manufacturer
eill Williams, Director of Smart R Distribution, explains how end-users looking to upgrade their Access Control system, can do so by enhancing what they already have, rather than ‘rip and replace’. “You have to know the past to understand the present.” Carl Sagan The main objective of this article
38 | April 2022 | IN SECURITY
is to raise awareness as to how end-users can be in control of the future of their system by having ownership of the ‘keys’ built into the Access Control cards. Before explaining why and how this is achievable, I believe it would be useful to take a brief look at how card technology has evolved over the last 40 years or so. In the beginning there was Magstripe Access Control card and reader technology. At the time of its
introduction it had a ‘wow’ factor with many impressed that for the first time, a person’s access credentials could be loaded onto a plastic card and this could be done by an installer, systems integrator or the end-user. The card, however, was poor from a security point of view as card duplicators quickly became available online, enabling anyone to overwrite or copy a card. In the 1980’s there was a big move towards using Wiegand cards
