When Allen Moore, Director of Security for Mesa Public Schools (MPS) in Arizona, was alerted that the state’s auditor general’s office was coming to visit, he wasn’t sure what to think. It was the first time in his 16 years with the district they had announced they’d be stopping by. “It felt like the IRS was coming,” Moore said. But his apprehension was put to rest after he began to show them all of the different layers of security they implemented. They were impressed about MPS’ solution for comprehensive key management Moore had expressed should be used in other districts throughout the state in the hopes it had the same impact on their schools as it had for MPS.

“We were in the stone age.” That’s how Moore describes MPS’ key management methods before they installed intelligent key cabinets in nearly every building throughout their district. Accessing keys back then was cumbersome — users had to insert a key into the box, which opened a keypad that required a code, which opened another door to put a key into the box to access the array of keys. Not only was this process time-consuming, but it was also inefficient. When keys went missing, there’d be no audit trail of who had which key or when, which significantly impacted monitoring them. District officials would try to review camera footage to see who had checked out a key, but that wasn’t always an effective solution.