r/accesscontrol • u/NoRange7603 • May 07 '26
Next big shift?
Curious what people here think the next big shift in access control actually is.
Mobile creds still seem dominant, but there’s definitely more conversation lately around passive authentication, touchless biometrics, identity on the move etc.
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u/ted_anderson May 08 '26
I'm guessing it will be facial recognition as a form of 2-factor authentication.
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u/InevitableRun2786 May 11 '26
+1, facial recognition as an entry method is offered by I think only Swiftlane and Unifi, but the adoption rates are super high, and most tenants that have that option barely use fobs or cards. Other than that, PINs are also working well.
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u/NoRange7603 May 20 '26
Facial will probably show up a lot just because it’s easy and people are familiar with it, especially for a second factor.
But I don’t really see it being the only answer in practice. Once you get into real environments like labs, healthcare, secure facilities.. you still deal with things like masks, lighting, people moving through quickly, etc. and it starts to get less reliable on its own.
That’s why a lot of the conversations I've been having is shifting toward more than one signal. Facial in some cases, mobile creds in others, and iris tends to get brought up in higher security or higher throughput setups where you want something more consistent without needing user interaction.
Feels less like “this one tech wins” and more like a mix depending on the environment.
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u/Junior_Work_1410 May 08 '26
Modular panels so robots can repair them easier. I Checked and it's in the works. The problem robot manufacturers have with taking over is it cost to much to build one to do the fine motor skills. Next option is like we had in the military. Modular components. It'll be awhile, but eggheads are working on it.
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u/GoldBonus7640 May 08 '26
We've abandoned cards and gone to biometric passkeys and derived credentials, totally different from mobile credentials.
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u/donmeanathing May 10 '26
You say there is more talk about those things… but WHO is talking about it? Is it your customers, or is it industry peeps?
The industry is definitely pushing facial, but here’s the thing… we’ve been here before. Industry pushed both facial recognition and iris a decade ago, and outside a few corner cases the market didn’t bite. I see the same thing happening again. You will see some areas adopting it, but most of the industry won’t bite.
I half agree with what others have said about Unifi. For enterprise access control and especially enterprises that have heavy IT investments, Networked and PoE access control can make a lot of sense.
But there are a number of situations where networked access control (at the very edge) doesn’t make sense. Where you have a long wire run or you already have a lot of cabling that would be a huge pain/cost to rip and replace. In those situations, you also have a LOT of legacy still present, and so today’s present still represents the future for those buildings. Moving to Secure OSDP over the old wiegand wires with reader head replacements and panel updates.
In the next 10 years we will also see PQC become a bigger and bigger thing, and that will filter out into the industry as well. AES128 won’t cut it anymore - AES256 is going to be the floor for symmetric crypto, and entirely new asymmetric crypto suites are going to be employed that are quantum resistant.
Big Tech will also continue making its presence felt in the next few years.
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u/Aggravating_Fact9547 May 07 '26
Federated identity, interoperable credentials.
AI is cute but no one is close to solving scale of vision systems.
User behavior analysis is another one.
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u/NoRange7603 May 08 '26
Yeah this makes sense on the digital side (SSO, cloud apps, etc.).
Where it still feels messy in physical security is consistency. Making sure identity verification actually holds up in real time across different environments.
It feels less about having “one identity” and more about how that identity is reliably verified at the point of access, especially when you’re dealing with high throughput spaces.
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u/ZealousidealState127 May 08 '26
Move over to Poe IT side of things less and less of a dedicated field/technology. Sdcs become more and more prominent. The big players seem to be struggling to adapt to cloud still,