1. Smart Access Control for the health industry
Hospitals, doctors’ offices, and health insurance companies need to comply with HIPAA health data regulations regarding controlling and restricting physical access to rooms/cabinets that hold patient’s folders/data and medicines.
2. Smart Access Control for the financial services industry
In the financial services industry, smart access control can help meet mandatory government regulations regarding credit card processing. Banks, insurance companies, and any business that accepts and processes credit cards are subject to PCI credit card data regulations regarding restricting access to the public. Internally, most staff must also be restricted to access certain rooms that house computers/servers with customer’s personal information. Smart access can provide access to certain individuals to certain rooms for limited time periods which they can unlock with their smartphones, and at the same time an audit is stored for each room’s unlocking activity – so a record is kept of who opened which door at what time.
3. Smart Access Control for the software industry
Any business that deals with privileged data and intellectual property, needs to meet Security Operating Center (SOC) cybersecurity regulations. Examples of businesses needing to meet these regulations include Software as a Sevice(SaaS) providers; data centers, software developers, entrepreneurs, startups, and pharmaceutical companies.
4. Smart Access Control for the manufacturing and industrial sector
Regarding staff safety, manufacturers (and other related industries) have a responsibility to ensure the health and safety of their employees around equipment and they must set protocols and make sure the workplace is compliant with regulatory standards. This is often referred to as the ‘employer duty of care’ responsibility. As part of this duty, your boss, by law, has the right to know where you are at all times, and the work environment must be secure and safe. For example, in most manufacturing environments the general public should not be able to roam around floors with machinery, and into private offices. Employee location tracking as a feature of smart access can provide improved worker security and safety, especially when managing evacuation procedures during an emergency, and for insurance reasons. In addition, tracking worker locations can enable many other workplace applications with a wide range of benefits including improved productivity; increased safety; and reduced costs. For example, productivity can be improved when it becomes easier and quicker to move around different sites and locations; increased safety can occur by restricting public and staff access to specific buildings/rooms/sites; and reduced costs can occur from not making staff drive across town to pick up metal keys to access multiple sites (and then driving back across town to return them again at the end of the day). In the past various efforts to track employee movements with GPS and mobile phones/apps have faced employee backlash due to privacy concerns, and it has exposed companies to legal actions due to grey areas in local laws. Smart Access control can avoid privacy concerns of apps and GPS trackers, particularly worrying as the apps keep on tracking ‘after hours’. Smart access systems avoid privacy concerns by acting like a traditional ‘punch card log-in system’, with the lock sharing information (not the user’s mobile phones) recording in a cloud database who opened which door at what time (and also providing live text/email notifications to managers.