Power Protection Plan

Mar 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By RANDY SOUTHERLAND

In its early days, access control meant a stand-alone system with limited capabilities, but for a large corporate utility with many locations, that was hardly an option. When Con Edison, one of the nation's largest and most famous power suppliers, began the search for a system capable of handling an expanding operation with a growing army of employees and contractors, they needed something that could meet their needs both today and in the future.

For more than 180 years, Con Edison (short for Consolidated Edison Inc.) has served the New York City marketplace. Providing electricity, gas and steam to customers throughout the five boroughs and to neighboring areas in Westchester County, the company is a vital fixture in the Northeast.

Con Edison began its technology search way back in 1986 when it decided to provide access control for a single facility. After surveying competing manufacturers, officials settled on Amityville, N.Y.-based Continental Instruments as its provider.

“Since that point in time we have included many of our other facilities,” says Dominic Grassi, Con Edison's technical manager for corporate security. “As we were going into integration, the supplier worked along with us and actually re-wrote some of their software to tailor it to our specific needs. We now have fully-integrated card access systems within the Con Edison compounds, where we use a main server with a redundant backup.”

The company installed the CardAccess 3000 enterprise class access control software in large part because of its ability to provide a seamless integrated interface for access control, alarm monitoring, visitor management, badging and other functions.

Levels of security

The system provided the security Con Edison needed for general access control needs such as in-and-out card readers. A second level required restricted access that granted privileges to select employees or contractors. The highest level was critical facility access that used biometrics, PIN codes and access control.

“We employed anti-passback at some locations, which introduced some problems with the software and using separate control panels on our system, so we worked through those issues,” says Tom Paratore, a technical specialist with Con Edison.

Integrating functions

The next step of integration was deploying CCTV and using it to monitor access events. When an alarm is set off alerting that a door is forced open, CCTV cameras need to pan to pre-set locations to observe the event as it occurs. This objective introduced a number of complexities when the company made the decision to integrate the system.

“We use a centralized communication server and host for all of our control panels, which means that when these events occur, they have to get back to the database, get processed, and that information has to trigger whatever the function is based on that event,” Paratore says.

In other words, the system has to decide whether the camera moves, a siren goes off to alert an operator, or it alerts another building. All of these functions had to be studied before being implemented into the real-time environment. To ensure that system components fulfill their critical functions, the company engaged in an extensive round of testing. In this test world, additional card readers run through their paces prior to introduction into a real-world environment.

“We test it, so that we know what is going to happen,” Paratore says. “Is it going to slow down our events? Is it going to have a negative impact on how fast things happen? These are all considerations that we needed to take into account when we started integrating CCTV, intrusion detection and other functions.”

Testing is also conducted on a mimic board containing various types of readers. A turntable holding the card rotates a prescribed number of revolutions per minute to simulate access entry and exit. The process taxes the system to determine just where its breaking point might be.

“We are simulating events at a very high rate of speed,” Grassi says. “It's like standing at a card reader and swiping away constantly with an ID card. We do that for hours at a time on a simulator just to see how the software is going to respond.”

Room to grow

One of the biggest drivers for security was Con Edison's need for scalability as the company grew. With more than 20,000 employees and contractors entering their facilities, the system needed to handle them all in an efficient manner while granting the correct level of access privileges.

Due to the size of the work force, Con Edison required a large number of access groups with complex combinations of privileges for various doors throughout its facilities. Although an earlier version of CA 3000 allowed for only two access groups, security officials were able to use combinations that satisfied the requirements of hundreds of doors within the access control system.

“We have 20,000 employees, we must have 20,000 employees residing on that control panel,” Paratore says. “We tried to maintain the functionality of the system as it was designed, so if communication is lost, the panel will make the decision on its own to grant access.”

In locations with interactive operability, such as anti-passback, the panel may not function properly in the event of loss of communication.

“In the earlier revisions of the software, we encountered issues where the system would slow to a point that it was a major concern,” Grassi says. “We went to (Continental's) engineering staff and within a matter of days resolved the issue with rewriting some software and correcting the quirk itself.”

Dealing with alarms

Officials were also concerned with the triggering of excessive alarms. For example, if an employee accepting a delivery props a door open, the system would continually receive alarms at that point in time.

“You could receive thousands of alarms in a day, which slowed the speed of the system in the early stages of the software,” Grassi says.

Access control is also integrated into Con Edison's human resources department. When an employee leaves service or is terminated, that employee's card is automatically disabled from the system.

The system's open architecture has become a vital plus as the utility has grown and acquired other companies such as Orange and Rockland Utilities, a company that serves a population of over 700,000 in seven counties in New York, northern New Jersey and northeastern Pennsylvania.

“The Continental System allowed us to maintain a lot of our hardware that was already in place from the previous access control system,” Paratore says.

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