The University of Sussex has consolidated its access security systems, controlling door access across its campus with RFID, from the product company Salto Systems. In Sussex’s case the main driver behind the upgrade is that the campus has a number of legacy systems. These consist of mechanical keys, magstripe locks, tags and a hard wired system with a licence per door operation. This has been making security on campus both inefficient and, thanks mainly to the licence, uneconomic.
Martin Chalker, Director of Estate Services at the University of Sussex, says: “We have something in the order of 15-20,000 doors across campus and these have been secured by a mix of mechanical and electronic systems of varying ages and sophistication. Being disparate systems, they use different technologies and thus are unable to communicate with one another locally, let alone centrally. We needed to change this by stripping out all the different systems and moving to one solution with departmental operation. Security/estate services would have full control of the entire campus, with local control granted to individual departments or buildings as required. To achieve this we had to upgrade our technology but still wanted something that was easy to set-up, control and manage.”
The south coast university was already using Salto elsewhere on site, and they decided to standardise on it across campus. This will also include on further new build student block (being built by Balfour Beatty) which will provide the university with 2100 more bedrooms. Construction is expected to start in early 2017 with the first phase ready for the 2018/19 academic year.
Chalker says: “SALTO is a first class product that gives us a very strong platform and a reliable and highly secure access management solution. We have found it good value for money, with good technical support and someone is always available to speak to when we’ve needed help or advice.”
