Key Control Best Practices: Keeping Your Business Safe

When upholding security in your business, key control is very important. This process can involve the management of physical keys, but it also involves asset access control, too and may encompass how you manage risks to security. It’s particularly important for safeguarding those assets and protecting your employees, and requires defining who is a key holder and key request guidelines.

Luckily, there are a few best practices that can help your company comply with key management and control, so there’s no need to be concerned about security risks. Our Toronto commercial locksmith, Lock-Up Services, has all the information you need. Let’s delve into the fundamental best practices that can help your business remain secure.

Importance of Key Control: Factors to Consider

If you are inadequately managing key control processes, your company is at risk of a few issues. Valuable assets are at risk without key control, but there are also many other ways your company is at risk. Disorganization can lead to vulnerability of the following:

• Members of staff
• Facilities in the organization
• Fleets that belong to the business

If your approach to key management is poor, then further consequences are also likely. Each time someone in your business loses a key as a result of poor key management, workflows and productivity suffer. This happens because a lost key can cause the entire team to have to pause their work to address security vulnerabilities.

But other consequences can happen, including high lock replacement expenses or key costs and the damage to your company’s reputation.

Now, visualize an entirely secure organization that is free from such security risks. This is what key control can contribute toward.

You may consider that key control systems are ideal for security managers alone, but they work beyond this use – they are ideal for the security of the entire business, and they do this by minimizing key loss, improving access management, enabling you to restrict access, and enhancing the peace of mind of your organization’s employees.

Establishing Key Management Policies

Key management centres on a few key policies. It’s also important to consider some essential procedures and to reinforce these aspects accordingly. If you’ve been trying to find the right key management policies and procedure enforcement steps, look at the examples below.

Vital Components of a Robust Key Management Policy

Some of the vital components of a robust key management policy might not be immediately obvious, but here, we’ll look closely at the aspects your business should think about. A few of the aspects include the following:

• Create an inventory of the keys and assets: This step involves considering the number of keys and assets that you’re going to need to secure. Your goal with this inventory process is to determine whether your professional locksmith service can accommodate the specific number of keys you’re going to need.
• Dig deeper into access requirements: This component requires you to reflect on the access needs of the business and determine if a commercial locksmith service offers the right control options for you. You might find that high-security locks are available, but knowing if the vendor’s services include unreturned key alerts, reporting, remote access, and remote access denial is also very important, as it will give you an idea of whether the services align with your needs.
• Consider the access control system integration: This step involves finding out if the new access control system can integrate well with your other applications. Your target with this step is to know if the system can work with your other physical security systems or existing locks and applications seamlessly. The best locksmiths in Toronto will offer a range of lock installation and keys, so that you’ll find the right option for your organization.

Tips for Enforcing Key Management Policies Effectively

The tips we recommend for enforcing key management policies effectively can make a difference to the security of your business. It begins with asking a few questions and implementing a few steps:

• Establishing agreements for key holders: Your agreement will be a document that establishes the rules and expectations related to key systems. Key holders in the business will find instructions that address a keying chart and access hierarchy that reveals who can access specific doors or spaces. With the instructions, keyholders will know how to access specific areas.
• Creating training sessions for key holders: Now you’ve established the agreements, you can focus on creating training sessions. The sessions should centre around a few important issues – for example, don’t forget to provide clear answers to how the new system works, which best practices to follow, the safety priorities important to the company, what to do in situations where someone misplaced a key, and restricted area access.
• Monitor key control processes and policies: Don’t forget to continuously monitor key control processes and policies. You can do this by checking reports related to key use and reviewing the data you gather to enhance the levels of security.

Regular Audits and Inspections

Regular audits and inspections: These are very important steps for key control in your business. They will give you visibility on how the keys are being used. A key tip you may consider for this process, as mentioned, could involve analyzing reports related to key use; as you gather data, you can gain insights into the key usage. The reports will be available through specific key control systems.

If you are envisioning a seamless way to improve security and minimize vulnerabilities, audits are ideal. For example, you may notice that at one stage, more employees need access to specific restricted areas in the business premises, or that they are unclear what actions to take if they can’t access the building.

You can use this data to take specific steps, such as ensuring they adhere to security measures – which might include contacting the right person in the organization if they want to access certain restricted areas.

Utilizing Key Tracking Systems

When we look at key tracking technologies, we see that they’re ideal in many ways. These systems are designed to help you track keys and access them in real-time; they are sophisticated technologies that can help you organize key data accurately and streamline key system management for your business.

These tracking system benefits are worth considering. Risk management, in-depth insights into who is utilizing the keys, faster incident response – such as handling potential breaches to security, management of employee access, and more are just a few benefits of utilizing key tracking systems.

To use key tracking systems efficiently, ensure the solution can be accessed by multiple people and consider cloud-based software. This software allows for visibility of the data wherever you have access to the internet.

We also recommend best practices such as knowing which data you need to track. Some examples include each lock, each key, each user, and each restricted area.

Use Key Control Best Practices with Solutions from Lock-Up Services

A world of security advantages and more comes from key control best practices, making a difference to your assets, employees, finances, and more.

As you prioritize key control as part of your security strategy, you take business security to a whole new level. We offer a full range of lock and door security options plus commercial emergency locksmith services that can align with your business’s key management approaches.

Use key control and key control best practices in the Toronto area with solutions from Lock-Up Services. Contact us, and with our solutions, maintaining secure key management methods to protect your company’s security will be simple.