Security Journal Americas hears from Frank Rojas, Business Development Manager for Hospitality & Gaming at Traka.
As Business Development Manager for Hospitality & Gaming at Traka, a critical part of my role is to ensure that we maintain good relationships with our sister companies and connect them with key accounts.
I work closely with Vingcard and we collaborate with a lot of hotel management companies and casinos to understand what our end users need and to educate them about the options for key monitoring available.
There are a couple of big challenges facing the hotel and casino industry. One is the responsibility to audit keys. Making sure that keys are being returned and that they are accounted for isnโt always an easy task.
Complying with the relevant legislation within different states can be difficult too. For example, if a key that pertains to a casino floor and its slot machines is with an employee and they walk out of the building, they could be fined.
The business will have to rekey any slot machine that worked with that key before, creating high costs.
Lastly, making sure that access control systems are integrated into the rest of the security ecosystem presents another challenge for hotels and casinos to overcome.
Key management systems can be used as a standalone solution to help keep track of keys. One of the features of these solutions includes the multiple authorization feature, which means that if you have a particularly critical key, in order to remove it, you need to have the employee and their supervisor hand over their identification.
That provides you with two points of accountability; if something happens to that key, then you can speak to two separate people about it.
Of course, integration of key management with wider access control systems helps administrators to gain even more oversight.
They can use one piece of software to manage their security environment. This is especially useful to casinos because if they need to remove a user (for example if an employee leaves), they only need to do it once rather than on multiple systems, saving time and money.
In the future, I believe weโll be seeing the ability to track keys in real time. These systems will be able to tell you when a key is too close to an exit or if someone has actually crossed the threshold with that key, allowing you to intercept it before it gets any further.
Vingcard has done a fantastic job of penetrating the market with its products. The next step for us is to make sure that we stand out among all the other key management options out there.
While they might have appealing price points, making them attractive to the end user, they are not necessarily the best option for them.
Through our partnership with Vingcard, we can educate these end users about key management and help them to understand the options out there.
Weโve really seen the success of this as the industry is starting to realize how much better integrated systems can be for them.
When reach out to these end users, we need to make sure the right people are in the room. We speak to the people using these systems day to day, because weโre solving their specific pain points and we also speak with IT departments, because software deployment is a vital part of this too.
Lastly, we speak to the decision makers, so they know that these solutions arenโt just a way to pull keys out of a box โ it benefits them too.
There are so many different security aspects to consider at hotels and casinos. Itโs essential these organizations deploy solutions that can scale, to be used by frontline security and other operations like food and beverages or major payments.
If one department sees another using this system and can see the obvious benefits of it, then it will be much easier to get the necessary buy-in.
There are also advantages to using this kind of system that become apparent at a later date. Lots of people drop their credit cards in a casino or leave them behind in a hotel.
Itโs a similar story with jewelry. Once found, these items are typically kept in a drawer, leaving them susceptible to being lost or stolen.
If stored correctly, using a key management system, they will be secure and only accessible to authorized individuals.
Weโre constantly thinking about keys but actually these solutions can be so much more.
Key management systems not only aid security, but lower labor costs too. If a key is returned regularly at 5pm, but the employee consistently clocks out at 5:30pm, it gives the hotel or casino cause to look into what they do for that half hour.
At the end of the day, key management systems provide benefits to a hotel and casino by enhancing overall operations, not just security.
This article was originally published in the June edition of Security Journal Americas. To read your FREE digital edition,ย click here.
