Access and intruder detection in the same place. And what that costs.

Inner Range is an Australian house with a long history in alarms, and Integriti is its current platform. The difference is one of approach: access and intruder detection are not two systems that talk, they are the same one. The same controller decides whether that card opens and whether that zone is armed, with one record per person, one permissions model and one log.

You recognise the problem straight away if you have it. A site that is armed when the last person leaves and disarmed when the first arrives, with different people every day: a shop, a school, a warehouse. With two systems that person carries a card and a code for the keypad, and the code ends up taped next to the keypad. With one, they present the card and the zone disarms with their name in the log.

The first: the door decision can depend on the state of the alarm. A door onto an armed zone does not open, or it opens by disarming only that zone and only for somebody with permission for both. With two systems that is approximated with relays, and badly.

The second: arming from the reader. The last one out presents their card, the system checks with its own records that nobody is left inside, and arms. Nobody types or shares a code, and the log holds a name and not «user 14».

The third is administrative: one single onboarding and one single offboarding. When somebody leaves, they stop opening and stop being able to disarm in the same act. With two systems, it is the alarm offboarding that gets forgotten, because somebody else looks after it.

And the fourth, the investigation: one single log where you see, in order, that the card opened at 21:14, that the zone armed at 21:17 and that at 03:40 a detector went off right there.

The first and most expensive: both get changed. You do not keep half. Both cabinets are replaced, and with them the detectors that cannot be reused and part of the cabling. A project that looked like an access one turns into two.

The second: two teams that already knew how to work have to learn again. Whoever ran the alarm and whoever ran the cards are not the same person, nor sometimes the same department. Unifying the system forces you to unify the procedure, and that is the conversation that sinks these projects.

The third: all the risk on one supplier and one database. With separate systems, a serious problem in one leaves the other standing. Not here, and making up for that with backup power and copies is part of the cost.

The fourth, specific to the alarm: intruder detection has its own regulations, its own connection to the alarm receiving centre and its own commissioning requirements. Changing intruder detection system drags all of that with it. It is not «one more integration», and anyone who puts it that way has not done the second half of the job.

And a warning from the trade: Integriti is powerful and therefore deep. It is programmed more than it is filled in. Badly configured, it does things nobody understands, and whoever comes next takes weeks to work out why that door behaves like that on Saturdays.

Controllers in a cabinet with modules you add —detector inputs, outputs, readers— and a central database with its administration client. They still decide on their own if the network or the server goes down, which in a system that is also the alarm is not a convenience but a requirement.

It scales by site: many small locations hanging off a central server, each with its own zone, its own schedule and its own people, and the administration split by region. That is its natural ground.

It talks well to video, and to several platforms: the alarm going off and the denied access come up with the image from that moment alongside. And it gets on well with wireless locks underneath, to reach internal doors without cabling. On credentials: encrypted card, protected reader cable and phone — with the keys held by the client.

The day-to-day belongs to the client, and the system is set up to delegate it: operator permissions are fine-grained and each person is given what they need. Onboarding, offboarding, profiles, permissions by zone, issuing and cancelling credentials and reports of who came in and who armed: the security team or the IT team runs that without calling us, and with several sites each manager runs their own.

Schedules have a wrinkle: here a schedule affects not only a door but also when a zone arms or can be disarmed. Changing one without knowing that can leave a zone unarmed over a weekend, and that throws no error: it simply does not arm. The client can change them, and change them well, but after training that explains both sides.

What is not the client's: the alarm zones, the detector map, the logic between access and intruder detection, and anything affecting transmission to the alarm receiving centre. That is touched with us, and not to protect our work: a change there can invalidate how the alarm system was commissioned.

What we leave: separate training for whoever administers people and for whoever understands the alarm, the manual for each week's procedures, the documented configuration and the operator permissions explained. The keys, the client's.

If what is there is a previous-generation system from the same house, part of the hardware in the cabinet can often be reused. Often, not always: it is checked module by module by reading what is printed on the board, and the result goes into the quotation before anything is signed.

If you are coming from two systems from two different houses, you migrate zone by zone and never all at once: one complete location —access and alarm— and a month running before touching the second. The detectors and the cable usually have some life in them; the panel, none.

And the part that gets forgotten: while the two worlds coexist there are people with a new card and an old code. That period is governed with a list and an end date, because a «temporarily» with no date lasts three years.