With so much money flowing throughout casinos, these establishments are a highly-regulated world within themselves when it comes to security.
One of the most critical areas of casino security is physical key control because these instruments are used for access to all of the most-sensitive and highly-secured areas, including counting rooms and drop boxes. Therefore, the rules and regulations that relate to key control are extremely important to maintaining tight control, while minimizing loss and fraud.
Manual Logs
Casinos that are still using manual logs for key control are at constant risk. Not only are there inherent inaccuracies with this system, including signatures that are missing or illegible, but this sign-out process is time consuming.
Analysis, reporting and investigation are extremely labor intensive due to digging through piles and boxes of log sheets, making it difficult to keep an accurate account of key usage while having a negative impact on compliance.
Choosing the Right Solution
When choosing a key control and management solution that meets the needs of the casino environment, there are important features to consider.
Multiple layers of security. Before accessing any key in the system, each individual user should face at least two layers of security. Biometric identification, a PIN or an ID card swipe to identify the user’s credentials are not enough separately.
The cabinet door should not open until the system verifies that the user has permission for the specific key requested.
Three-man rule. For certain keys or key sets that are highly-sensitive, compliance regulations may require signatures from three individuals, one each from three separate departments, typically a drop-team member, a cage cashier and security officer. A secure key management system should be programmable to recognize these keys or key sets and only open the cabinet door and release them once the three required logins are complete and the credentials verified. A system designed for user convenience will prompt for the additional logins only once, regardless of how many sets were initially requested.