Founded in 1991 with head office in Austin, Texas, HID Global is the supplier of choice for OEMs, system integrators, and application developers serving a variety of markets, including physical and logical access control, card personalization, eGovernment, cashless payment and industry.

With several developing trends in the New Year, growing demand for a more mobile-centric and satisfying user experience will be the primary driver for security technology innovation in 2016.

The growing security demands in various companies could be a result of company expansion where an access system needs to be flexible enough to grow as the company evolves based on organic growth or as a result of mergers and acquisitions. Notably, there tends to be a difference between the access-control system needs of a small and medium business and that of a large enterprise, with the latter requiring more scalable solution that allow individual access levels and other features. It is important that companies with frequent visitors integrate visitor management solutions into their access control system, which significantly improves issuance of temporary credentials and makes the whole process more efficient and compliant. Temporary employees could be issued with cards with time-limited access. Another possible solution is to issue mobile IDs on smartphones, which are quick and easy to create, for visitors.

There may be multiple features organizations with ageing systems are missing out on, such as higher levels of security and keeping abreast of the latest advancements in credential technology, which are constantly evolving. In fact, innovations are emerging so often that some technologies that were considered state of the art a few years ago are already considered outdated. Newer credential technologies allow for several applications on one physical access card, simplifying the system's everyday use for end users.

Also on the rise is the trend in using mobile devices as credentials, facilitating secure and convenient mobile access. To support this some parts of the access control system, such as the readers, may need an upgrade. Finally, it could be necessary to unify credential technology and access control infrastructure as a result of mergers and acquisitions or if there is rapid organic company growth.