Past, present and future
By developing pioneering technology that leads the way for integrated security solutions, PACOM is undergoing a period of intense activity. Gavin O’Keeffe, the company’s global technical director, takes a look at what’s been happening and what to expect in the forthcoming months.
The wider security and access control sector is undergoing a period of innovation, technological development and intense growth. For PACOM, this was reflected during the first quarter of 2018, when we accomplished our best ever level of trading. Having achieved 20 product launches in the first six months of 2018, we are on target to match this in the second half of the year.
Integrators and end users are choosing to work with innovative vendors and our research and development (R&D) team recently took part in a weeklong hackathon. This gave engineers a chance to indulge in creative self-expression, form teams around a problem or idea, and look at how new technology could be incorporated into our products and systems. There were some fantastic ideas developed from this event that are currently being investigated further.
At PACOM we are dedicated to improving the performance of our solutions, enabling information to be transferred quickly and efficiently. Increasing levels of network traffic need to be processed in real time and we have developed a new algorithm that speeds up the transfer of data and has the potential to process over 1,000 events per second. This is industry leading and highly significant when it comes to keeping people, property and assets safe.
Today’s customers expect the same level of functionality in their work related technology as they get from devices such as smartphones. Many of us are familiar with contactless mobile payment and we have taken this principle into access control. Through the use of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), mobile readers offer a whole new level of reliability and flexibility for end users, and we are set to launch this solution for our products soon.
Furthermore, despite advances in many areas of access control, the level of security between readers and controllers has not always been high. We have been working hard to improve this state of affairs and we now have a system that has been tested to meet Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 128-bit compliance – a standard recognized as being ultra-secure and virtually unhackable. This greatly reduces the risk of unauthorized entry and adds to the security of an end user’s building.
Although there was a great deal of noise surrounding the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) when it became law in May, it is not making the headlines now as much as it did. However, organizations should not become complacent when it comes to the acquisition, processing and storage of personal data. At PACOM we continue to take GDPR seriously and have incorporated a number of encryption and management tools into our solutions to keep personal information safe. These make it easy for users to be GDPR compliant and give them one less thing to worry about.
Although it is always good to reflect on current successes, every day brings new threats and risks. That’s why we have more than 50 R&D engineers working hard to deliver systems that push the boundaries of what’s possible with security and access control technology.
