Nestled within World Heritage listed Lamington National Park, in Australia's Gold Coast Hinterland, O'Reilly's Rainforest Retreat has secured its guest room and villa accommodation with SALTO Systems access control installed by FRANKSecure.
O’REILLY’S Rainforest Retreat is designed to be the perfect place to escape to relax, revive and rejuvenate. The retreat allows visitors to experience the magic of the subtropical Australian rainforest as well as fresh mountain air, crystal clear creeks and breathtaking sunsets. The spacious location comprises 66 rainforest retreat accommodation rooms and 48 self-contained luxurious eco villas.
With so many rooms to manage securely, access control is a vital part of the O’Reilly’s operation. The retreat was operating a magstripe access control system but wanted to upgrade and replace this with a more modern, reliable and robust locking system that was both easy for guests and staff to use, and would not be effected by the environment surrounding the property.
“All of our room locks throughout our property are exposed to the elements and our older magstripe style lock readers were failing constantly,” explains O'Reilly's Rainforest Retreat manager, Jane O'Reilly. “This gave us the incentive to upgrade and since changing to SALTO we’ve not had any failure problems as the contactless readers are better able to cope with our climate.”
SALTO access control is ideal for the O’Reilly’s application in multiple ways. It’s not only resistant to challenging moist environments by its nature, it’s remarkably easy to retrofit without losing core aspects of access control functionality. SALTO’S access control solutions are built around a range of battery-powered, wireless locking devices that retrofit into existing mortise locks or knobsets in minutes and function using reader technologies including smart card, contactless smart card and dual technology cards.
“Our local dealer FRANKSecure has fitted XS4 offline escutcheons to 115 doors at the retreat, as well as a quantity of CU5000 offline controllers and these now give Jane, her staff and their guests a smart, modern and reliable access control system,” said Hayden Flett, business development manager at SALTO Systems Australia.
“The central objective of any hotel’s security system should be to provide a convenient, comfortable, safe and secure experience for guests throughout their stay,” he says. “That’s what SALTO does – it takes care of property security, as well as streamlining and maximizing staff management activities. It also controls and manages who can open which doors at which times and controls rights to who goes where and when, and creates an audit trail while doing so.”
SALTO locks are designed to be installed in off-line applications on doors (or padlocks) and a full audit trail of events, as well as changes to access authorisations, are passed around the system network on-card as part of what Salto calls SVN (Salto Virtual Network). What is SVN? It’s the credentials themselves moving around the building in the hands of cardholders. Whenever cards and locks and cards and hot-spots meet, as part of their wireless exchange, they exchange a complete update of authorisations and events going on across the network.
“Individual lock history and other security functions of the system give us excellent management information if required”
Through the hotspots this information funnels back to SALTO’s Pro Access management software running on a workstation, which allows administrators to manage things like access time zones, view audit trails, as well as driving anti-passback and relay management. Pro Access software can manage large numbers of door installations, and as most access related information is written on the credential, the management of the doors becomes, in cases, a management of the credential. By simply updating the badge, you can change most access related authorisations of the users, including adding/deleting doors, time zones, calendars, etc.
The fact SALTO is not hard wired is also beneficial for O’Reilly’s. Wireless means its less expensive to install and that there are not layers of terminations and cable runs around the site certain to oxidise in the wet rainforest climate, causing accumulations of resistance and multifarious signal failures. It’s a clever solution. In the past, if you had 100 standalone electronic locks installed in a system, each lock had to be reprogrammed manually if a cardholder was being removed. Salto’s networked locks work in a different way, with local locks and readers working in concert with hot-spot readers (SALTO WRM 9001s connected to the central controller via Ethernet) with the cards being the mechanism by which the readers and central controller exchange information.
Using these hot-spots, the remote readers are able to share information about events and access control privileges with the central controller and throughout the network, with every card in the hand of every cardholder being part of the system’s distributed architecture of online and offline memory. It’s a strangely simple and awesome way for an access system to communicate.
Salto installations are a bit more complicated than the traditional standalone access control locks of yore but much less complicated than hardwired access control and they have strengths that make them vastly superior to standalone locks. What you actually get with SALTO is full function access control of all interior doors at a fraction of the cost of hard wiring and, according to SALTO at a cost that’s only marginally more expensive than a quality commercial mechanical masterkey system.
You get all the features of a hardwired access control system with SALTO including unlimited audit trail, dynamic access profile changes, calendar and shift control, intruder alarm, automated unlock/relock periods, automatic lost keycard cancellation, departmental operator management, ethernet connectivity of all online devices and the ability to interface with other popular access control and BMS systems.
Importantly, communications between carrier and electronic lock are encrypted and secure and SALTO locks can always be opened from the inside using a single action panic feature that works in conjunction with the relevant mortise lock. SALTO locks, like the SALTO XS4 used at O’Reilly’s, have high security protection via high resistance, hardened anti-drill plates to protect wiring and reader area. Additional protection provided by hardened axes and floating steel balls in the handle area. Other neat features include low battery power indication monitored through the SALTO Virtual Network (SVN), emergency opening via portable programming device (PPD), non-volatile memory.
“What I really like about our new SALTO system is that it provides reliable, easy access to all rooms and villas throughout our property for our guests,” says O’Reilly. “Individual lock history and other security functions of the system give us excellent management information if required, and the availability of remote access troubleshooting was extremely attractive given our remote location.”
Features of SALTO access control include:
* Managed by software
* Virtual Network capable through SALTO Virtual Network Technology
* User on-card audit trailing capability
* Communications between reader, door controller and PC encrypted
* No additional control panels are required
* Alarm input
* Set up made with Portable Programming Devices (PPD) or via PC
* Update made with Portable Programming Device (PPD) or SVN
* Anti Pass Back mode available depending on the model
* Firmware upgradable by PPD or direct from PC to on-line units.
