01 June, 2011
category: Contactless
HID Global announced that the company’s credential and reader solutions for access control have been selected by mutual insurance company EMC to protect its entire, corporate campus at the company’s headquarters in Des Moines and an additional facility in Ames, Iowa.
EMC worked with a systems integrator to design a solution for protecting seven buildings, two parking lots and one parking structure. The company’s existing, 15-year-old access-control system infrastructure was based on proprietary technology that was no longer supported by the manufacturer, making it impossible to expand.
For EMC’s upgrade, the company selected HID’s iCLASS/Prox combination cards, iCLASS R40 readers for all buildings and iCLASS R90 long-range readers for the parking garages. The new access-control system was phased-in over eight weeks and included 160 HID iCLASS R40 readers with paired, 64-bit authentication keys for EMC’s buildings.
All data transmission between cards and readers is encrypted using a secure algorithm, and custom, non-interchangeable keys are used for locations requiring the highest levels of security. In EMC’s two parking structures, the company installed 12 iCLASS R90 readers, which combine the longer-range read capabilities of contactless technology with the power, encryption and mutual authentication capabilities of smart card technology.
EMC plans to expand the HID solution to its 17 branch offices across the country, from Providence, Rhode Island, to Phoenix, Arizona.
During the upgrade, EMC simultaneously re-badged its 1,800 employees with HID 32-bit iCLASS contactless smart cards which were personalized with photo IDs using two on-site printers. Employees carried both badges during a two-week transition period. At the elevators, the new cards speed traffic flow by automatically granting floor access to employees in a single read operation, which is a noticeably faster process than the prior system that required verification and then approval of each individual floor request.
Moving forward, the field-programmable iCLASS technology will make it easy for EMC to add or subtract employees, or change their access profiles. EMC also has the ability to add applications to the cards, including cashless vending, time/attendance, logical access, energy control and video authentication.