As you may have noticed, there is a significant focus on migrating to cloud-based solutions for security solutions. This article wraps up our three-part series on cloud-based solutions for security professionals.
Let’s look at how deploying a cloud-based visitor management solution can help your team minimize on-site and in-person interactions while optimizing operations and reducing capital expense.
Think Virtually
Once again recognizing the new reality for entrance lobbies and the staff that is present there all day, it’s important to minimize interaction with visitors. A visitor management system can be pre-populated with information about the expected visitor or contractor in advance. If your company has decided to remove the staff from the lobby to ensure safety, then you may have employees entering their own expected visitor information into the system. This can allow only that employee to greet the visitor to provide their credential to be worn during their visit.
With a cloud-based solution, any employee can enter or remove visitor information from their desk, accessing the centralized server in our cloud. Likewise, the system can also be accessed remotely by your staff while they are working from home, allowing them to have the visitor credential ready when they arrive to greet the visitor.
Hardware Reduction
When implementing a traditional visitor management system, the hardware server is required to be on-site at your facility to store data about visitors and their activity while at your facility. With a cloud-based solution, the server doesn’t need to be located at your facility. The visitor management server software can be located remotely, in the cloud, eliminating the initial cost of the server as well as reducing overall power consumption and room cooling to service the server.
Again, as you’ve seen over the past three articles on this topic, the number of servers is significant and can be eliminated entirely.
In-person Maintenance Reduction
Considering the multiple systems that you currently have in service, it’s important to consider how much of it could be located off-site. This is perhaps the most significant benefit in a post-pandemic environment. With the servers and located off-site, in the cloud, the need for a security technician to visit your site to service the hardware or software is eliminated. Additionally, all operating system, software, and hardware updates no longer require a visit to your facility as they are handled within our cloud environment. This eliminates person-to-person proximity and frees up your team to work on other tasks without being interrupted.
Software and Operational Changes
When it’s time to change visitor badge formats, templates, add or remove system users, or make any other system settings, all changes to the system are done remotely by your staff or even by our team under a managed services contract agreement.
Cloud Migration
Now that everyone from the security team to the CEO is realizing that working in a virtual environment isn’t just for the IT department, it’s time to formulate a migration strategy for your visitor management solution. Badge printers can, in most cases, remain the same. If not, one-for-one replacements can be made quickly, minimizing the impact on your front desk operations. Changes to any operator workstation software can be minimized and, if necessary, be performed remotely or during off-hours when social distancing is easier to implement.
A Clearer, Cloud-based Vision
We’ve discussed video surveillance, access control, and visitor management in the cloud-based solution series. When you add up the servers, on-site time, business interruption, and new distancing policies, the impact on your organization can be significant and shouldn’t be overlooked.
To help keep your security team and facility as safe as possible, Vision Security Technologies will design, engineer, install, and maintain systems that meets the needs of your organization from a safe distance. We will work with your IT team, security team, and customer service representatives to ensure that all stakeholder expectations are met.
Our team can perform any on-site installation, migration, or maintenance during non-peak hours with proper PPE in place. Your employees, visitors, contractors, and administrators demand a security, safety, and visitor management solution that meets specific expectations and performance criteria that help them work safer and more efficiently. Our team has the experience and expertise to meet your expectations. We’ll visit your site in-person during off-peak hours, virtually using streaming video, or review your location drawings and as-built diagrams to determine the best migration path for your solutions.
