A Fail Proof Strategy to Prevent Tailgating in your Building

Tailgating or piggybacking is the most common form of security breach that happens across many residential buildings and office complexes. It starts out innocently – an employee opening a door and holding it open for others, visitors without badges, or the passive acceptance of an uninformed worker, and is often ignored by the security personnel as a non-serious offense. However, not all people who piggyback have harmless intentions.
While common courtesy demands holding doors for one another, in an access controlled environment, however, this behaviour is called tailgating – something that happens at a rate of 40-60% of all entrants to a corporate workplace. The impact and costs of tailgating are far and widespread affecting both the business and the personnel. These costs are both tangible and intangible.

Tangible costs include theft of equipment, sensitive hardware or intellectual property, workplace violence, and physical attacks to network equipment. The intangible impact of such breaches can be seen in a greater level of acceptance for poor management behaviour, harassment and ethical short-cuts etc. creeping into the organization’s culture. Another intangible cost associated with tailgating is the loss of productivity due to an incident occurring. Smaller incidents such as the theft of a wallet results in a feeling of insecurity and create mistrust amongst the employees.

There are two kinds of measures that one can take against tailgating – Behavioural Change and
Technological/Hardware Change. Let’s take a closer look at both.

Behavioural Change

Tailgating is primarily a behavioural problem, and a well-planned social engineering strategy can reap rich dividends here. When badges are not worn at all times it can compromise security efforts. A company must have a strong and clearly laid down badge wearing policy that encourages employees to wear their badges at all times. Also, by enabling multiple uses of the badges, one can influence the badge wearing behaviour. For eg. badges can be used to clock in and out, to attend class, to obtain a meal or work gloves, and gain access to a printer in corporate setting.

Another important change that can encourage the usage of badges is the change in physical placement of badge reading equipment. Placing the reader in a location where it is easily accessible to people can be really helpful. For eg. several Silicon Valley companies have placed the card reader on a pedestal a few feet in front of the door that has ensured badges are read even when they arrive in groups.

Hardware and Technological Change

The single most effective deterrent to tailgating as observed by most security professionals is single-person revolving doors which physically restrict access to a single user at a time upon presentation of a valid credential. However, there are several challenges with single-person revolving doors. First of all its not feasible to install these at all corporate acces points due to issues of culture, aesthetics and accountability. Secondly, they are highly restrictive in throughput, expensive to install and maintain and are not conducive to an inviting culture of a collaborative work environment.

Advancement in the Access Control technology has led to solutions that are far more open, have a greater throughput and are aesthetically more pleasing. Cloudastructure is a frontrunner when it comes to preventing tailgating through its highly efficient and smart access control system

One of the biggest advantages to Cloudastructure’s integration of Access Control and Video Surveillance is that, with an additional ceiling mounted camera, accurately count how many people enter through a door and match that to the number of cards reads. Tailgaters can be automatically detected and automatically e-mailed, with a copy of the video clip of them letting in a tailgater. Many of our clients have seen compliance change dramatically as all the badge holders swipe in every time.

One badge swipe, one person. Everytime. This is what we try and accomplish with our advanced ACaaS solutions.