Accelerating the Transition to Connected Environments

As workplaces transition to more connected environments that are aware of their occupants and offer them seamless, personalized experiences, the challenge of identifying an individual remains constant. Connected environments rely on understanding who is interacting with the environment and the needs of those individuals in order to ensure that the right services are seamlessly available to people when they need them. 

A variety of technologies,  from entering a PIN  to facial recognition, have been explored to solve the identification issue for access control,  but authorizing an individual via a credential they possess still remains the most cost effective way for granting access to business systems. The choice of technology to be used for secure access must offer convenience to the end users without disrupting their daily workflow, while assuring the identity of individuals. The hardware integration is often the most time consuming and resource intensive; thus, technology must also overcome potential barriers that arise from hardware integration with various business systems from parking gates to printers.

For example, workplace business systems like conference room phones, meeting room displays and virtual desktop systems typically don’t have enough real estate on the device to integrate a camera or sensors for biometrics. And, they often don’t have enough power to successfully include additional hardware. Therefore, any changes to these devices can be costly and slow down the route to market, while also chipping away at the user convenience.  In addition, the user’s identification needs to be assured so that only authorized users are allowed to access the appropriate services, while others are denied access.

There is a way to alleviate the challenges organizations face when seeking to authorize individuals into various workplace systems and devices. Small embedded reader modules with capabilities to read a range of credentials--from low frequency to Bluetooth can offer an easy transition path to connected environments for the business systems manufactures. Because of the module’s size, it can be integrated seamlessly with systems that have a small footprint, such as a conference room phone. At the same time, the flexibility of deployment options makes such a module suitable for a large range of applications including applications that rely on battery powered mode.

Today’s embedded reader modules are also designed to leverage mobile technologies that enable users to access doors, gates and authenticate to other workplace business systems with a mobile ID on their smart phone. Packed with features designed to help transition to connected environments, business systems manufacturers are looking to embedded solutions as part of paving a path for organizations to take a far more people-centric approach to workplace evolution than ever before.