Brivo Drives Building Security to a New Level with Embedded Analytics

Challenges

•  Provide a better way for customers to visualize, analyze, and comprehend their data
• Enable customers to easily distinguish potential security risks and trends from normal activity
• Generate more dynamic and interactiveweb-based reporting options

Solution

Brivo leverages insightsoftware to create a ground-breaking platform that offers scalability and flexibility, providing their end users access to powerful visualizations and reporting tools.

Benefits

• Intuitive, easy-to-use, flexible tool for their users to handle large data sets
• A modern user interface for non-data users to take advantage of underlying security data
• Financial and resource savings and quicker time to market by embedding analytics instead of building an in-house solution
• Finer controls and in-depth reporting options

Technologies at a Glance

• Logi Symphony

“The biggest impact of using insightsoftware’s technology is the ability to put together a really slick
user experience around interacting with your data without a ton of custom engineering on our part.”

– Jeff Nielsen, Chief Technology Officer, Brivo

A Need for Data Visualization and Advanced Reporting

Every day, a building’s security is at risk as individuals come and go. It relies on the right mix of hardware and software to protect the property, people, and information inside from possible intruders or unusual activity. That’s where Brivo comes in.

Brivo specializes in cloud-based access control and security platforms that help property owners and security teams regulate access. These systems combine hardware—such as badges, readers, and video cameras—and access control with credentials provided in cards, key fobs, biometrics, or mobile apps. As individuals enter a building, security systems identify their credentials and then determine whether they are authorized to enter.

One of the challenges Brivo had with their platform was a lack of in-depth reporting options. Their customers couldn’t access deeper levels of their data to identify potential problems or risks. They wanted a way for their customers to query their data, sort it, and visualize it to quickly understand it to make informed decisions about their security.

Also, with increasing emphasis on physical security and cybersecurity, Brivo’s customers needed an efficient approach to quickly identify critical information, such as a security breach or other anomaly. They needed to know what data to focus on without reviewing multiple video screens. This need was particularly important for larger enterpriseswith security teams that had to monitor greater volumes of people and physical locations.

In Search of Deeper and Actionable Analytics

To meet their challenges, Brivo committed to finding a way to provide predictive analytics and trend analysis for their customers to visualize, analyze, and understand their data. They required a solution with the ability to:

• Give large enterprise and smaller customers deeper and actionable analytics with more on-demand reporting.
• Provide insights within their application to offer greater value and service to their enterprise users.
• Empower their small business users with better insights and visibility into their data needs.
• Scale to meet the needs of a single location while providing vast analytics capabilities for multiple locations, helping security teams find the largest security holes.

Brivo required an intuitive, easy-to-use user interface (UI) for their diverse set of users to handle large data sets and quickly pinpoint any abnormal activity. It had to be simple enough so that a receptionist or security guard could use it to monitor one or two doors. Yet, it had to be powerful for a manager or director of several sites to monitor security staff responsiveness to alerts.

“We have millions of events that happen every hour. How do you find a tool that can work with that size of data and that has the data science background to manipulate the data? The insightsoftware platform offered a fast solution that we could white label, keeping it as part of the same platform, while making it usable by someone who wasn’t an expert in analytics.”
– Jeff Nielsen, Chief Technology Officer, Brivo

If an intruder were to tailgate through an entry, force a door open, or access a building outside of regular working hours, Brivo requires the platform to capture the event and alert the correct employee. By having this information, security teams could avoid unpredictable events that, although they might not appear serious at the time, can have the potential for severe outcomes (known as black swan events).

Jeff Nielsen, Chief Technology Officer for Brivo, didn’t want an analytics plug-in or to add a layer on top of their current, third-generation platform. He wanted a way to seamlessly integrate analytics capabilities, reimagining their enterprise-level platform into a world-class security solution.

A Game-changing Partnership to Strengthen Building Access Control

After evaluating several dierent analytics and BI tools, Brivo chose to partner with insightsoftware for their scalable embedded analytics platform. Brivo was sold on the platform’s abilities to integrate right into their existing solution and to analyze data through a simple, easy-to-use UI. Plus, they found the technical support and professional services teams easy to work with.
Nielsen says, “The biggest reason we went with Logi Symphony is that we could host it ourselves; it integrated well with our platform. The interface was appealing for our non-data users to navigate. We also liked the performance characteristics for working with large data sets.”

Brivo is using the insightsoftware platform primarily for their enterprise-tier customers to access their Brivo Data Explorer tool. This tool connects the insightsoftware platform to their data warehouse and its data lake and filters for each individual customer. By providing the ability to access real-time embedded analytics, their customers can ensure the right people receive the right reporting.

With the Data Explorer tool, security team members who have approved access to the system can explore various scenarios to see whether security should follow up on them. For example, they might review event data, filtering out normal events, to locate unusual activity from the previous week that they were unaware of. They can also focus on error-type events to identify any trends and whether they’re associated with a single door, a single site, or a specific day of the week.

Brivo prides itself on the breadth of their data. The access credentials alone come with a plethora of information, such as user and site data, including the number of doors or readers. They also include details such as a person’s name, role, credential type, and the last time they used their credentials.

Nielsen says, “We have over 75,000 unique sites where people are using Brivo in the U.S. and in 40+ countries around the world. We have over 20 million folks with credentials and generate about 13 million to 14 million events a day. You won’t find that magnitude of data elsewhere. In terms of user experience, it’s one of the best I’ve found.”

With all that data, Brivo places great value on the information it holds, knowing the data would be useless without the ability to analyze trends and gain insights.

Visualization and Reporting with a Seamless Interface

Brivo will roll out the fourth generation of its cloud-based access control platform later in 2020. The platform, which is built for enterprisescale companies, hosts a modern user interface via a single-page application that aims to use the underlying security data. This platform provides several tools, such as the following examples, for large-scale organizations to easily visualize, analyze, and understand their security data.

• Global View entails a map of sites anywhere across the globe. Users can view unusual activity that’s highlighted by a flashing red pin at the location.
• Photos pop-up on a screen to show individuals as they enter and exit a door.
• Users can call a snapshot log to view the profile pictures of everyone who just entered or exited a particular door.
• With more fine-grained permissions, larger organizations can flexibly define permissions by role, with fewer permissions to a security guard, for example, and more permissions to executive levels.
• The availability of bulk actions means users can assign thousands of credentials at one time instead of assigning them one-by-one.
• The real-time device view shows all doors, panels (gateways), readers, and cameras that an enterprise has at one time that users can sort, filter, and search.
• Every page has sort, filter, and search capabilities to work better at scale.

Kerstin Demko, Brivo’s Vice President of Marketing, states, “Adding these features and more comprehensive options for security delivers on our promise to the market to provide a safer, smarter, simply better future. We’re helping our customers gain visibility into their security, giving them the control they need to make sure that the right people get the right
access and can take action when appropriate.”

With the new embedded analytics platform, Brivo’s enterprise customers can now zoom in on their data, find what they need, and act quickly. From the minute someone reaches a door, Brivo gathers data that users can focus on and analyze by site, date, or week depending on their needs.

“With the amount of knowledge and industry that we’ve married with this kind of data visualization from insightsoftware, Brivo is literally changing the game for access control.”
– Kerstin Demko, Vice President of Marketing, Brivo

Brivo and insightsoftware: Delivering a More Secure Future

By partnering with insightsoftware, Brivo can provide greater value in their customer solutions and increase the number of enterprise users and average revenue per account. Plus, Brivo saved on developer time, resources, and money by embedding analytics from Logi Symphony instead of trying to build the capabilities in-house.

Brivo has reached a whole new level in providing secure building access. Through their partnership with insightsoftware, Brivo embedded analytics capabilities directly into their security platform, increasing their time to market. Now that their customers have access to the immense value in their data, they can analyze the information they need, gain insights, generate in-depth reports, and act quickly. Plus, their customers get added peace of mind knowing that their properties are more secure.

About Brivo

Brivo is the global leader in cloud-based access control and security platforms for commercial and multifamily properties. Our mission is to provide Simply Better Security solutions that improve user experiences for property managers, tenants, employees, and visitors. With over 20 million users and 1,500 authorized resellers, our SaaS platform has been unifying the security experience across access control, mobile credentials, video surveillance, identity federation, visitor management, intercoms, and elevator control since 2001. Hundreds of software partners and endusers use our APIs and SDKs to extend our solutions to unique vertical market oerings. More than ten years of SOC audits underscore our commitment to protecting customer privacy and data
security. Brivo is privately held and headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland.

About insightsoftware

insightsoftware is a global provider of reporting, analytics, and performance management solutions. We enable the Office of the CFO to connect to and make sense of data. Over 32,000 organizations rely on our best-in-class solutions for increased productivity, visibility, accuracy, and compliance. Learn more at insightsoftware.com.