Page 128 - Security Today, April 2018

SECURITY MANAGEMENT
SECURITY FROM THE GROUND UP
Florida Atlantic University maintains security as the campus continues to grow By Jason Ouellette
Florida Atlantic University (FAU), a leading research insti- tution with its own medical college and 180 degree pro- grams, is constantly growing and changing—and so its security platform needs to keep up with managing the lat- est developments on campus.
A UNIQUE CHALLENGE
FAU, one of 12 schools in the state’s university system, was constructed at the former Boca Raton Army Air Field in 1964. The Boca Raton cam- pus encompasses dozens of buildings and houses about 4,000 of the system’s 30,000 students. It also employs about 3,200 faculty and staff.
In the summer of 2016, FAU opened a new building as part of its Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine, providing the educational institution with the opportunity to implement the C•CURE 9000 access control and security management system from the ground up.
The new facility, called Office Building 1, presented a unique challenge to FAU, since the third floor houses research administration, while the building’s first floor is an actual medical clinic.
According to Patrick Garmon, Director of Security Technology for FAU, it was important to implement a system that enabled the univer- sity to manage student access to the building by floor and by room, not just restrict access to the building itself. To date, it has been the most comprehensive access control project at the university, enabling the university to partition building access based upon the clearance level of a particular medical student or professor.
“Most of the buildings on our campus have exterior doors covered by access control,” Garmon said. “We have now started to grow our interior access control with our new College of Medicine building tak- ing the lead on that initiative.”
The new building is now part of a three building complex for The
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