Access Control Installation for Mississauga Businesses

A mechanical key is anonymous, permanent and copyable. Once it leaves your hand you cannot tell where it went, you cannot withdraw it without changing the lock, and you have no record of it being used.

A credential is the opposite on all three counts. Revoking a departing employee takes ten seconds from a laptop rather than a locksmith visit to every door. Access can be scoped by time, so a cleaner's fob works between six and nine in the evening and is dead at any other hour. And every presentation is logged, which is how you answer the question of who was in the stock room on Sunday.

The audit trail is usually undersold in the sales pitch and is the thing businesses end up valuing most. It resolves disputes, it satisfies insurers, and in a regulated environment such as a clinic or a pharmacy it is often a requirement rather than a nicety.

Every powered door has to be told what to do when the power stops. Fail safe means the door unlocks. Fail secure means it stays locked. Getting this wrong is either a fire code violation or an unlocked building, and it is decided per door, not per system.

A maglock holds a door shut with an electromagnet and no moving parts, which makes it attractive on glass doors and on frames that will not take a strike. It also means that when the magnet is energised, the door is physically immovable, and that is a life safety matter rather than a preference.

Because of that, a maglock on any door in a means of egress needs a set of interlocks that are not optional: release on the fire alarm signal, release on loss of power, a request to exit device on the inside, and in most cases a clearly marked emergency release button beside the door that cuts power directly to the lock rather than asking a controller to do it.

This is where cheap installations go wrong. A maglock wired through a controller with no hardwired emergency release, or with the fire alarm interface never connected because the alarm contractor was a separate trade, is a door that will hold shut in a fire. If you have inherited a maglock installation, having the release path tested is worth doing before anything else.

The 125 kHz proximity cards and fobs that most Canadian buildings still run, the ones commonly sold as HID Prox or EM4100, transmit a fixed number with no encryption. A cloner bought online for the price of a lunch copies one by being held near it, and the copy is indistinguishable from the original.

Encrypted 13.56 MHz credentials solve this by using mutual authentication and a rotating exchange rather than a static number. If you are specifying a new system, this is the specification not to compromise on, because the cost difference at installation is small and retrofitting readers later is not.

Mobile credentials on a phone are increasingly the practical choice for staff, since people lose phones far less often than fobs and a replacement is issued instantly. Keep a small stock of physical cards for visitors, contractors and anyone who would rather not install an app.

One habit worth building regardless of technology: audit the credential list quarterly. Systems accumulate active credentials for people who left years ago, and every one of them is a working key.

The decisions that are expensive to change later are all made before anything is mounted, so they are worth a proper conversation.