Page 92 - Security Today, April 2018

CLOUD ACCESS
GETTING HIGH MARKS
For the expanding Riverview School District seeks wireless and cloud-based access control By Jeff Perri
Central Arkansas’ Riverview School District is on the small side, serving only about 1,300 students, but the district’s Superintendent, Dr. David Rutledge, is a big thinker. When the district recently agreed to invest in a new access control system to secure the Junior/Senior High School campus, Rutledge was determined to install a solution to encompass the campus’s entire 150,000 square feet of space, spanning multiple buildings, while providing ease of access to teachers, admin- istrators, maintenance and custodial staff.
“We are a consolidated district that has grown tremendously since we were formed, in 1991,” Rutledge said. “The problem with growing incrementally is that we ended up without a common system. It was difficult to keep track of all the keys that were in circulation, and impossible to keep track of the people entering our buildings.”
The project was put out to bid and awarded to Blue Sky Technolo- gies, of Jonesboro, Arkansas, for its innovative and extremely cost- effective approach leveraging a cloud-based, wireless solution called pdk.io from Utah-based manufacturer, ProdataKey.
LAYOUT OF THE CAMPUS
“After we began to evaluate this project in its entirety, we quickly rec- ognized that based on the physical layout of the campus and the way the buildings were geographically dispersed, the cabling and boring
costs to put in a traditional system would have been astronomical,” said Brian Duckworth, managing partner at Blue Sky Technologies. “A wireless, cloud-based solution made perfect sense. We installed a sin- gle ‘cloud node’ at the high school’s Main Distribution Frame and wire- less door controllers at each of the 45 external doors on campus.
The door controllers communicate back to the cloud node over a completely self-healing, wireless mesh network that services only the pdk.io solution. It required no cabling, and the wireless connectivity is extremely fast and secure.”
Each of the approximately 100 district employees have been pro- vided with credentialed key fobs that provide them with access to cam- pus buildings 24/7.
“We wanted our teachers to still have access whenever they needed it, but now, we have a record of who is coming and going. If some- thing happens over the weekend, we can see who was in the building when, and that really helps us out from a management perspective,” Rutledge said.
The system is primarily maintained and managed by the district’s technology coordinator. However, the system’s reporting features are accessed regularly by other school administrators using the easy-to- use phone app or web browser interface.
“Before my principals head home at night, they can pull up the app, take a look to see which doors have been left open or unlocked, and
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