Editor Introduction

College campuses are meant to be places of learning, growth, and community. Fostering such an environment requires the deployment of policies and technologies that ensure safety and security. Considering the growing role of security technology in the higher education market, we asked this week’s Expert Panel Roundtable: 

What are the new applications for security technology in the college and university markets?

Colleges and Universities are both drivers and recipients of security product development due to the all-encompassing ecosystem that’s inherent on campus environments.

Campuses often have dedicated police departments that utilize security products for traditional needs, and they’ve enhanced their ability to be proactive rather than reactive by using analytics for things like weapons detection. Additionally, campuses have arenas and event spaces where line queuing analysis can lead to better venue experiences, and mass communication techniques can mitigate dangerous events.

Campus environments have retail applications as well in the form of bookstores, coffee shops, or cafeterias, and side-by-side transaction data along with corresponding video can reduce or prevent losses. Higher education environments can, and do, pick up the very best from other vertical use cases and can layer on new technologies that become available to provide safety and operational efficiencies.

Editor Summary

Our Expert Panelists list a variety of new and evolving technologies that are serving important roles in protecting our colleges and universities, including AI-enabled cameras, wireless locks, mobile credentials, and gunshot detection systems, among others. Protection needs are evolving along with changes and challenges in the higher education environment. Fortunately, technology also continues to evolve to meet the changes, whatever they are and however they evolve in the future.

Read the full article on securityinformed.com