Be the Boss of Your Access Control Data

With 20 years of experience working with companies of all sizes and all industries, we’ve learned a lot about what customers need from their physical security. As technology catches up with the security market, Brivo noticed that many organizations were not leveraging the data from their security platform to its fullest potential.

Many people might think physical access control is pretty mundane; determining who is authorized to open a door or not might seem boring. But there is so much richness in the act of granting or denying access to a room, floor, elevator or any part of a building. If you think about it, doors are the boundaries around the environments we live and work in. Gathering insight into what is happening at access points throughout your building ultimately gives you insight into the people’s behavior, which is fascinating and critical in these times of social distancing.

How Brivo Approached Reinventing Access Control Data Analytics

Brivo has a 20-year history of servicing Fortune 500 enterprise organizations as well as tens of thousands of small and medium businesses with our cloud access control solutions. From that vantage point, we’ve seen firsthand how the power of data analytics can simplify security operations, reduce the burden on physical security staff and prioritize actions based on the level of risk they pose to enhance the overall safety of the properties we protect.

So how did we approach reinventing data analytics for physical security? When we sat down to figure out what the future security platform should look like, we knew we needed to accomplish multiple objectives. We needed to find a way to provide trend analysis and data that can help our customers do more with the data from their facilities In particular, we wanted a solution that would be usable, both in the large enterprises as well as small to medium sized businesses that would give people actionable insights, when they needed and wanted them. 

We wanted data analytics that was built into the application itself, rather than just delivering raw data or CSV files like other solutions provide. We know from our experience, that this data-dump without context is practically unusable by the end-user because they don’t have the time or in many cases data science expertise to figure out what it all means to take action.

We also needed to handle large data sets with good performance and responsiveness, so that users could click a button and access their results in seconds, not hours. Brivo itself receives millions of access events per day, and some of our largest customers have thousands of events per hour, even hundreds of events per second. Performance was a key requirement as well, to handle enormous data sets. 

Finally, we wanted to provide a solution that would be simple enough for a security guard or front desk receptionist to monitor, and powerful enough for a security lead to pinpoint abnormal activity or risky activity anywhere in the world. The result: we created two powerful data analytics tools powered by machine learning and an unmatched data infrastructure that allow businesses to gain actionable insight from their access control activities. 

Brivo Global View

Brivo customers all around the world have hundreds of thousands of edge devices that are constantly reporting events streaming into the platform every second. This gives us the ability to take those events, and correlate them with things like doors and devices, and users and sites. This data warehouse is scalable, distributed, fault tolerant, always up, and ingesting all of this data. 

Brivo provides multiple mechanisms to access and work with that data within Global View. We’ve taken the most commonly requested visualizations and reports and built those right into the interface. Global View gives you an overview of everything happening in your property or portfolio, whether they are in one city, all over the country or all over the world. Through an event tracker, you can see events one by one as they come into your access control command center, the Brivo Access interface. 

You can see door opening activities, door ajar alerts, video associated with these actions and much more. You can customize what is important to you and bring those needles in your haystack in your specific environment. You can classify events as both normal and informational as well as critical to create warnings or alarms when anomalies surface and you want to take immediate action. 

In addition to views of events, you can use Global View to see all of your devices. A customer request, this feature allows you to know if all connected doors and cameras are responding and configured in the right way. If there is a panel issue or a battery is low, you can see that in Global View. We wanted all security professionals to have the ability to see what is going on in your business across sites, locations and geographies and understand where they should prioritize their time and attention based on security criticality. Displayed in map, site, and location formats, you can zoom in or out quickly to dig into access data without needing to be skilled in data, coding or IT.

Brivo Data Explorer

The second powerful data analytics tool built into Brivo Access is Data Explorer. Data Explorer gives users a robust tool for ad hoc data querying and visualization. We wanted to make it easy for security teams to do their own data analysis and exploration.

Data Explorer renders your data useful by organizing and structuring it to allow you to see events and patterns in events to help you make better decisions. 

With Data Explorer, you can create your own charts and graphs in real-time updated dashboards. You can export charts and graphs into PDF, CSV or graphic formats to share or even schedule them to run at specific times. Data Explorer visualizations illuminate insights that you might have missed in the raw data allowing less technical users to take advantage of data insights. Because you understand your data better than anyone, you are able to customize these reports according to your own needs without a data science degree.

Now facility and security professionals  can quickly and easily get to the insights to improve business efficiencies. It removes the noise security teams need to sift through to find a critical event, so that they can take action. Do more with the resources you have and be the boss of your secured and connected world.