ISONAS Inc., an IP access control and hardware solution and part of the Allegion family of brands, announced its access control solution was selected by Oakwood University Church in Huntsville, Ala.  The Oakwood University Church provides spiritual nurture to over 2,000 members and 1,600 students on the campus of Oakwood University, a historical African American university founded in 1896. In the spring of 2016, Oakwood University Church security personnel conducted a comprehensive security assessment of the campus and submitted its recommendations to the church’s senior pastor, Dr. Carlton Byrd. It was recommended that the church needed to improve security at their facilities and make major changes in the way access was controlled. Instead of having hundreds of keys assigned to staff members, the church needed to control access electronically and wire all entrances and doors for an automated entry system. To meet this new requirement, the church needed to find an access control solution that was easy to manage from one unified platform, while also integrating seamlessly with its existing video surveillance system. The church felt ISONAS was the perfect choice for this.

With no access control system in place, it was difficult for Oakwood University Church to track who was going in and out of their facilities daily. In many cases, personnel would leave without notification and not turn in their keys, making it cumbersome for the management team to control future access. They wanted to ensure that a person’s access could be controlled with a set of constraints that allowed an individual to access a certain area at a specific time. A phased approach allowed the church to slowly build a cost-effective powerful integrated access control system on one unified platform. 

Both ISONAS and a local integration firm, Digital Support Systems customized the solution based on the church’s needs.

“Over the past year, Digital Support Systems has become enamored with ISONAS’s Pure IP cloud-based access control solutions and has helped push the IP revolution forward  by steering customers away from traditional panel-based access control systems,” said Jim Wilson, system analyst at Digital Support Systems. The phased approach consisted phase one, where 14 doors in the administrative complex were outfitted with the ISONAS RC-04 reader-controllers. Phase 2 consisted of outfitting 27 doors in the church’s new Family Life Center. Phase 3 included adding ISONAS readers to 14 more doors in the administrative wing of the church. With 55 readers installed in 2019, Phase 4 will add on 14 double doors surrounding the sanctuary on both upper and lower levels and Phase 5 would complete the remaining 22 doors, bringing the total number of ISONAS readers in a five-year time span to 91.

“The ISONAS Pure IP solution that we selected has been the perfect fit for us. The ability to lock-down the entire facility with a single keystroke is a ‘tour de force’ in the industry and we believe that it is an investment well spent,” Byrd said.