The market for automated key control systems has increasingly expanded as end users across a broad plane discover the benefits of controlling access to valuable keys. New markets for automated key control and management systems now go beyond traditional applications in the corrections, healthcare, education, gaming or multi-family markets as well as specific applications such as automotive dealerships.

In the past few years, key control and asset management systems have become a requirement throughout a broad spectrum of vertical markets including corporate, government, correctional facilities, healthcare and educational markets to name just a few. One of the enabling factors for this is the ability to manage all programming, remote functions and reports for the system with a software-driven solution. Both access control systems and customized client control software can interface with the application.

Before the advent and widespread use of electronic key control systems, key control was often a haphazard routine. Many organizations used an honor system to store and control building keys, while institutions such as correctional facilities or medical campuses used a more formal system requiring access activity to be hand-written in a log book. The procedures were often ineffective, mostly laborious and frequently left the organization exposed and vulnerable because keys could not be one hundred percent accounted for.

Security guards are often assigned additional duties outside the formal scope of their jobs that, over time, can become integrated into their regular operational tasks. For example, in a shopping mall guards may provide information desk services; on a university campus they may be responsible for lost and found; or, at a casino they may provide emergency automotive assistance.

It has been said that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail and nowhere is this more true than in the management of physical security operations. In any organization, growth can trigger the need for significant changes and/or upgrades to physical security systems, including established key control systems. For the scalability of key control, as with other systems, the degree to which the needed changes can be met is determined by the plans put in place.