Managing Campus Facility Access Within A Virtual Server Environment

The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the nation’s top research universities, recognized for its excellence in science and technology. Georgia Tech’s campus occupies 400 acres in the heart of Atlanta, with 900 full-time instructional faculty and more than 20,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The Georgia Tech Police Department (GTPD) is responsible for ensuring campus safety and building security 24/7 and is responsible for managing access to more than 1,800 doors across multiple campuses, buildings and parking garages using the Georgia Tech BuzzCard access control system.

The Challenge

Georgia Tech’s campus buildings were controlled by proprietary door hardware, which locked GTPD into an inefficient physical access control system (PACS) supported by a single regional vendor. The existing software-based PACS required building managers to assign access control privileges from a specific workstation, with limited web browser support. The legacy, Windows-based PACS server required continual IT support and maintenance, weekly and monthly security patches and significant vulnerability testing before deploying software updates. All of these factors limited the effectiveness of GTPD’s access control system as well as the productivity of its IT and security teams.

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