Put simply, iLOQ gives you a way of managing who can access your buildings, equipment and remote sites without having to manage huge numbers of conventional keys. It combines physical locks with digitally managed access permissions, but does it without needing batteries inside the lock.
That last bit is rather clever.
For a business with three doors and half a dozen keys, none of this may matter very much. For an organisation with hundreds of doors, cabinets, compounds, plant rooms or remote sites, it can matter a lot.
What’s wrong with a key?
Absolutely nothing, most of the time.
Keys are simple, cheap and very good at what they do. The trouble starts when you have a lot of them, particularly when you have lots of people who need them as well.
A few familiar problems tend to appear:
- Someone loses a key.
- Someone leaves and forgets to return one.
- A contractor needs a key that is sitting in an office 60 miles away.
- Nobody is entirely sure how many copies of a key are actually out there.
- A master key disappears and suddenly the conversation becomes considerably more expensive.
This is where the difference between managing keys and managing access starts to become important.
With iLOQ, the objective is not simply to replace one clever-looking lock with another. It is to give an organisation much better control over who should be able to get where, and when.
So, what is iLOQ?
iLOQ is a digitally managed locking system that allows access permissions to be controlled centrally.
Depending on the application, people can use programmable credentials or mobile devices to gain access, while the organisation retains control over what those credentials are allowed to open.
If somebody changes role, their access can change. If they leave, their access can be removed. If somebody only needs access to particular locations, they do not necessarily need permission to get into everything else as well.
It sounds obvious when you say it like that, but it is quite a big change from handing somebody a bunch of keys and hoping they all make their way back eventually.
The really clever bit is the lack of batteries
Electronic locks normally need power from somewhere. That might mean wiring them into the building, installing local power supplies or putting batteries into the locks themselves.
iLOQ takes a different approach.
Its battery-free locking technology uses energy harvesting, so the small amount of electricity needed to operate the lock is provided when the credential is used.
That means there is no battery sitting inside the lock waiting for somebody to remember that it was supposed to be changed six months ago.
If you have ten locks, battery maintenance probably isn't going to ruin your week.
If you have 2,000 locks spread across the country, it becomes a rather more interesting consideration.
This is one of the reasons iLOQ makes so much sense for large estates and remote infrastructure.
Imagine your contractor needs a key tomorrow
This is one of the easiest ways to explain why digitally managed access can be useful.
Imagine you have a contractor who needs to visit one of your sites tomorrow morning. The site is 80 miles away, the contractor only needs to get into one particular area, and the physical key is currently sitting in somebody's desk drawer at head office.
With conventional keys, somebody now has a little logistics problem to solve.
Who has the key? How does the contractor get it? Do they need to collect it first? Does somebody have to meet them there? When does it come back? And, perhaps most importantly, does everybody remember to make sure it does come back?
With digitally managed access, the question becomes much simpler:
What does this person need access to, and for how long?
That is really the principle behind iLOQ. It turns a lot of key-management problems into access-management problems.
And access is much easier to change than a piece of metal.
Lost keys become a different kind of problem
Losing a conventional key can be annoying. Losing a conventional master key can be very annoying indeed.
Once a physical key is out in the wild, you don't necessarily know who has it, whether it has been copied or whether it will turn up again three years later in the glovebox of somebody who used to work for you.
Digitally managed credentials give you much more control.
If a credential is lost or somebody no longer needs access, their permissions can be changed or removed within the system. You are no longer automatically faced with the traditional choice of crossing your fingers or replacing a large number of locks.
That's not quite as exciting as talking about smart technology and NFC, but in the real world it can be considerably more valuable.
And there’s no point having a clever lock you can’t open during an outage
Remote and technical sites often become most important when something else has gone wrong.
If there's a power cut, network failure or equipment problem, that may be precisely when an engineer needs to get through the door.
Depending on the application, iLOQ does not require a permanent electrical supply to the lock itself. That makes it particularly attractive for infrastructure environments where power, cabling or communications may be unavailable, impractical or part of the very problem somebody has arrived to fix.
It is a small detail until the day it isn't.
Why Litenet and iLOQ?
Litenet comes at iLOQ from a technology and operational point of view rather than from traditional locksmithing or security.
That matters because the problem is rarely just the lock.
It is usually about people, permissions, contractors, lost keys, multiple locations, difficult-to-reach areas and the amount of time being spent trying to keep all of that under control.
We want to understand how access works across your organisation today, where it causes problems and what needs to change.
The lock is only part of the answer.
Intelligent Access exists because we see iLOQ as a technology platform for managing physical access more intelligently, particularly across larger, distributed or operationally complex estates.
Litenet has been working with iLOQ since 2022, when our UK partnership was covered by PBSA News as iLOQ introduced its intelligent locking technology to the UK student-accommodation market.