Favorite Access Control Credentials 2016

Anyone have any guess when biometrics are going to make a big move up for physical access control? They have certainly become much more common over the past few years in phones.

Depends on the size of the project. For large installations where you have at least 10s of doors, you will have mostly card reads or multi-model (Fingerprint and card reader), so maybe 10-30% have fingerprint of some kind. At the other extreme, small business which have 5 or less readers almost always ask for fingerprint or multi-model.

I guess because when you are talking about a few fingerprint readers for an SMB (typically 1-3) for an office of up to 200 people, the overall cost for fingerprint readers is not that big compared to other security system elements (such as the CCTV system and the fire alarm), especially since you also don't need to use proximity cards.

In addition, a lot of what works on the SMB side of the market in Kuwait are the relatively cost Asian brands such as ZKteco.

Moreover, a lot of the standalone fingerprint readers also come with time and attendance features which are nice for SMB

In our office for example (where we have around 150 employees), we have a fingerprint reader with time attendance features (for all our staff) at the main entrance and a proximity reader just for the stores (with only two cards). Both are standalone and based on IDteck.

NIST has all but banned 125khz for Federal facilities, but the transition is slow and extremely painful. Out of the 50 or so Federal sites we maintain only 5 have made the move to 13.56 and full HSPD-12 compliance, but even those 5 opted not to use FICAM due to cost and complexity.