6 Critical Features to Look for When Upgrading Your Commercial Entry Points

The decision to install facility locks and commercial entry systems is often influenced by recent events (or their prevention) more than long-term thinking. To better manage the lifecycle cost of the facility lock and entry solution, here are six features you should be looking for when purchasing or improving a commercial entry security system.

Fail-Safe vs. Fail-Secure: Get This Right First

First and foremost, learn how each door functions in the event of a power failure. A fail-safe lock will automatically unlock when power is lost, meaning the door will open. A fail-secure lock will remain locked when power is lost. One isn’t better than the other; it is all based on the location of the door and how it fits into an emergency evacuation strategy.

For rooms like server rooms or high-value storage, you’ll want a lock that is fail-secure. For a fire exit or general egress route, you’ll need a lock that is fail-safe. If this is overlooked, you’ll be putting lives in danger, as well as breaking a building code that’s intended to govern how occupants of a building can exit in the event of an emergency. Before any hardware is ordered, a commercial locksmith should be able to map out each point of entry.

Remote Management and Instant Revocation

The turnover of employees imposes the largest additional costs on the operation of the key system. When employees depart, their keys are often not returned or used to make copies. Since the threat is real, you must rekey your locks to protect your business from liability cases and theft. Few, if any, companies faithfully rekey after each termination. But most of them are doing so under threat because they could not know if the key is in the hands of a disgruntled former employee. They rekey whenever they have their compelling reason. Times when the door locks are growing, the owners have lost the keys or when supervisors have made the keys for other workers are other common motivations for reinstalling the lock.

The potential threat of lost keys makes sense to businesses. It can cost a small fortune to change all entry locks and keys, not to mention the time and inconvenience for staff and clients. Well-configured access control systems make it a breeze to rekey the locks of your entry door. Access can be easily controlled, revolutionized, or removed from a lost keycard, key fob, or switch code without the need for a locksmith or the purchase of new equipment.

Credential Types and What They Mean For Overhead

Physical cards and fobs have been used as standard access control measures for many years, but they have inherent problems. Cards tend to get lost, and fobs can easily be given to the wrong person. Replacing them incurs a cost, and each new card or fob poses a security risk until it’s disabled. That’s why mobile solutions, using either NFC or Bluetooth to give access via a smartphone or wearable, are increasingly the new normal. Mobile is now the primary credential for 39% of organizations, up from just a handful not long ago (HID Global, 2023 State of Physical Access Control). For businesses that have to regularly let people go, such as co-working spaces, logistics operations, or casual staff scenarios in retail, the migration to mobile can also make a meaningful difference to your overhead at the front door.

While physical cards are still needed in some instances, such as in the case of an RFID solution, ensure the cards themselves use a highly encrypted protocol. In older proximity cards, the most commonly used format before the advent of smart card and RFID technology, skimming attacks were theoretically simple. An attacker just needs to pass within an inch or so of someone’s pocket to read the card’s details and make a clone.

Audit Trails as Operational Intelligence

An audit trail is a timestamped record of every credential event, who accessed which door, at what time, and whether the attempt was successful or denied. Most businesses treat this as a liability tool, something to check after an incident.

That’s underselling it. Audit trails, when reviewed proactively, reveal patterns. Doors that are being accessed outside business hours. Areas that employees have access to but never use. Attempts on restricted zones that didn’t succeed but keep repeating. Automated reporting can flag these patterns before they become a breach.

For businesses with multiple sites or shared facilities, real-time audit data also simplifies compliance, particularly where you need to demonstrate that only authorized personnel entered certain areas during specific timeframes.

Integration and Scalability

A proper entry system must be well integrated. Door hardware must be able to interact with your current CCTV ecosystem, alarm monitoring system, and possibly your HR or visitor management system. This is easy with systems that support open API integration. However, with a proprietary system that can’t talk with anything, this will just be costly.

Scalability also counts here. If you need to swap out all your hardware every time you add a new building or floor, then you technically don’t have a system, you’ve just had a bunch of one-time installs. The overall design should allow new doors and users to be added without replacing existing infrastructure.

As a system matures, tailgating detection is a feature worth adopting. Sensors or camera-based AI that spot two people passing through a single authorized scan are now common in high-security facilities and increasingly available for commercial gear.

Matching Hardware to the Actual Risk Profile

There isn’t one right answer to how a commercial entry upgrade should be configured. A single-tenancy office of ten employees has vastly different needs from a logistics facility with 24-hour shift access, numerous suppliers, and high-theft inventory.

The door should be the intelligent line of defense where the most vulnerable staff, assets, or IP are protected. From that point of reality, it’s important for the technology decisions, type of credential, level of authentication, type of fail state, depth of integration, etc., to flow towards where the problem is, not the other way around. A door that does its job generates data that saves money over the lifetime of the product is of a higher value than the door that simply looks like Fort Knox for a day or so.