Do You Need to Improve Your Key Management?

Unsecured keys are a safety hazard to you, your employees and your customers, especially if these keys grant access to high-security areas, heavy equipment or valuable products. Poorly managed keys are easily stolen and can be used to swipe vehicles from auto dealerships, access school buildings, or put apartment residents at risk.

Organizations often fall for the false sense of security a key pegboard in a back room or a padlocked box might provide them. These practices won't be enough to stop determined thieves, however. Keeping keys out of the wrong hands boils down to improving key management.

What Is Key Management?

If your company has a lot of keys, key management is an essential tool to help you stay organized and keep track of all of your keys. Not only does a key management system help you monitor the keys themselves, but it also helps you monitor when keys are checked out, who is checking them out and when they are returned.

Why Does Key Management Matter?

Replacing a missing key might seem like a minor expense, but even one missing key can lead to costly problems. If keys are lost, misplaced or stolen, your business could be at risk of theft of more valuable assets like vehicles or electronics.

Compare the concept of managing keys to good password security. If somebody with malicious intent guesses your simple password or finds it written on a piece of paper, they could easily have access to a large amount of personal and private data. They could use that information to buy things in your name, ruin your public image or damage your credit.

Poor password security can lead to expensive consequences. Likewise, weak key management practices can damage your organization's bottom line and reputation.

How Can You Improve Your Key Management?

Though keys are the gatekeepers to your most valuable assets, you, like many businesses, might still rely on low-security methods for keeping those keys safe. Pegboards and lockboxes with manually maintained key access logs are examples of low-security key management that can go awry, especially if you don't maintain accurate logs.

The good news is that there are several options out there that can help you keep your keys and assets secure and react quickly if a key does go missing. It's important for you to select a key management system that secures keys in tamper-proof steel drawers or secure panels and also automatically logs who took keys and when.

Automatic logs eliminate mistakes that could happen with manually maintained logs, giving you an accurate audit trail that will allow you to react quickly to a missing key and respond to potential security breaches.

Keys are an important access point for vehicles, apartments, restricted-access locations and more. By keeping your keys secure, you're helping keep all the associated access points secure as well.