IOT for Hotels: Secure Access Control

Executive Summary

Armadillo Hotels Group (AHG) was formed with the idea of creating a different type of Hotel chain. One that would better support needs for company bookings and billing for multiple rooms, long-term stays, at an affordable price.

AHG's vision was a layered and relational software system that could support operations for all aspects of a hotel, for a system that was secure, robust and flexible. The cost savings associated with a single platform would allow Armadillo the ability to address its main goal of offering quality stays at a price point better than most other hotel chains.

Challenge

As an outsider, a hotel’s operation appears to be simple—it sells lodging along with food and beverages. But a hotel is a highly complex operation where many departments must function, coordinate and interact together to ensure smooth day-to-day operations.

Armadillo’s vision for a comprehensive, secure, robust, and flexible hotel management software that could streamline operations across all hotel core service areas:

• front office
• housekeeping
• food and beverage
• accounting
• human services
• engineering and maintenance
• sales and marketing

This case study focuses specifically on the autonomous room access feature that AHG wanted to provide to its guests. In essence, Envative was tasked with implementing an IOT-enabled mobile, keyless room entry that  would allow guests to enter their room without having to first check in at the front desk and obtain a keycard.

Solution

AHG's goal was to provide autonomous, secure room and/or common area access for guests as well as employees such as housekeeping and maintenance staff. The access control solution needed to include monitoring, user permission control, reporting and logging of access activities.

AHG wanted to ensure user access would be reliable with safeguards in place to address potential connectivity issues.

In addition, they wanted to make sure the end result would be scalable and cost-effective so that they would could continue to offer their rooms at reasonable rates.

To support these features, Envative selected AWS IoT Core to provision devices for rooms and common areas and used Message Broker to send/receive updates to/from the devices in an asynchronous, secure, and reliable manner. Some of the IoT-enabled support features include:

• Support of housekeeping activities, allowing staff to enter the room when cleaning is required. The application reports back to management on all cleaning activities performed as well as other upkeep and maintenance needs of the room.
• In addition to securing individual room doors, the devices control common areas for guests or employees.
• Monitoring the devices in case of hardware or connectivity issues with a relay of health check information back to AWS.
• Custom CloudWatch metrics and dashboards were developed to monitor the overall health of thousands of devices.
• Access logs are recorded with each entry and stored in AWS DynamoDB
• Access logs include a camera snapshot of the entry attempt, stored in AWS S3.

Why AWS?
It was an easy decision to utilize the AWS IOT suite of tools and services for the AHG IoT access control system. Here's why:

AWS provides for accelerated innovation in a complete set of IoT services, with infrastructure to scale quickly and seamlessly. From secure device connectivity to management, storage, and analytics, AWS IoT has the broad and deep services needed to build complete solutions.

Since security is a major factor in every system implementation, the fact that AWS IoT services address every layer of an application and device security with safeguards was an important consideration as well.

With the ability to create models in the cloud and deploy them to devices with up to 25x better performance and less than 1/10th the runtime footprint, AWS brings artificial intelligence (AI), machine
learning (ML), and IoT together to make devices more intelligent at a reasonable cost.

Results and Benefits

The design and architecture of this system offers several key performance benefits such as:

• Scalability - the ability to automatically scale – solution can process trillions of messages while avoiding infrastructure costs, licensing fees, and other operational expenses.
• Efficient expansion - the solution supports ease of scale as additional hotels are added to the system. The newly added hotels can install the access control software and hardware devices at new rooms and automatically provision these rooms for use.
• Security - Secure device connections and data with mutual authentication and end-to-end encryption are in place to mitigate cyber security risks.
• Economical – Messages are transmitted and received using the MQTT protocol which minimizes the code footprint on the devices and reduces network bandwidth requirements.

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"The Envative team is very professional and knowledgeable. They have excellent technical skills, solid project management and have been very easy to work with."

- Lee Eichen, AHG Technologies, LLC

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Conclusion

The Armadillo Hotel Group has been very pleased with all aspects of Envative's AWS IOT Access Control implementation. They continue the expansion of their hotel group and rely on Envative as their trusted Software development and AWS solutions partner.