The physical security and locking product manufacturer Abloy UK is advising companies to secure remote sites and minimise the risk of fines using access control technology. This advice follows Thames Water’s recent record fine of over £20m for polluting the River Thames with 1.4 billion litres of raw sewage.
The water company was functioning with reduced operational resources, resulting in unmanned sites. When alarms were raised signaling issues, they were not attended to immediately – including one being ignored for 37 hours.
However, Abloy says, a product such as its PROTEC2 CLIQ with CLIQ Connect could prevent these kinds of events from happening by allowing access to be granted remotely, so incidents can be dealt with swiftly. PROTEC2 CLIQ allows for the remote management of disparate or large electronic master-keyed sites, provides audit trails on locks and padlocks, and allows lost or stolen keys to be invalidated, for secure key management.
CLIQ Connect enables PROTEC2 CLIQ keys to be activated through a smartphone using Bluetooth 4.0, for remote access control. The makers claim that it’s suited to organisations that have engineers and contractors visiting remote sites, for sectors including defence, utilities, telecoms, transport, education and healthcare.
Steve Wintle, Head of CNI at Abloy UK, said: “We can see from the example of Thames Water that many businesses are under resourced, and this is often how mistakes and accidents can happen. Investment in a system such as CLIQ Connect could have saved a business such as Thames a significant fine – not to mention the cost of negative publicity and the impact this could have on share price. By de-centralising the authentication of access, the system can act as a secondary confirmation, and access and actions can be double checked, preventing costly incidents such as this.”
Visit www.abloy.co.uk.
