By Scott Meyer
When it comes to preparing for and responding to an emergency, leaders at Lanai Road Elementary School in Southern California know exactly how important planning, practice, and access intelligence can be.
When the Encino school was threatened by wildfires in 2025, its staff, students and visitors were ready, due in large part to a system implemented by the school that combines emergency preparedness and response with visitor management and compliance. Relying on the system, staff members mobilized to rapidly and safely evacuate everyone on campus at the time, even after local phone lines went down.
In this case, the system, Sign In App, “actually did save lives,” says one school official.
The outcome may have been significantly different had school officials lacked access intelligence—the ability to view visitor lists, track people’s whereabouts, communicate in real time, and take live headcounts to verify the evacuation was a success. As education institutions and a range of other organizations, from manufacturers and defense contractors to government agencies and healthcare, are discovering, a high level of access intelligence is essential when the stakes are highest.
Such a system can also yield big efficiency and productivity gains. In Lanai Road Elementary’s case, it’s saving staff huge amounts of time on an ongoing basis. With an easy-to-use kiosk-based sign-in process, it has cut visitor check-in time from two to three minutes to 30 to 45 seconds, making a “radical impact” on the productivity of front-office staff, who may process as many as 2,500 visitors during a given three-month period.
Access intelligence is indeed a critical organizational attribute, especially in the context of emergency preparedness and response. It means having the real-time insight at hand to know exactly who is on-site, seeking access to, or engaged with your physical facilities, digital infrastructure and employees, why, and for how long. It also means knowing at any given moment where people are within your physical footprint and then having the ability to translate that information into rapid, effective action during an emergency, be it a natural disaster, severe weather event, or active physical or cyber threat.
With a high level of access intelligence, organizations can anticipate what’s coming, not just record what happened. That proactive posture is invaluable for emergency preparedness and response, and in shaping more personalized, curated experiences for visitors.
Is access intelligence a strength or a weakness for your organization? That depends largely on the systems and processes it uses. Manual visitor logs, siloed systems, spreadsheets and inconsistent protocols invite gaps, blind spots and risk across compliance, visitor management and emergency preparedness. During an emergency evacuation, for example, an organization could miss people in less obvious areas or waste valuable time because all they have is a paper roll call. In organizations where a steady influx of contractors, visitors and temporary workers create constantly changing onsite populations, this lack of full visibility into who’s onsite can create serious safety and compliance risks.
Risk lives in the gaps between the physical and cyber domains, where strong security in one can be compromised by weak, subpar security in the other. Access intelligence closes those gaps by connecting the two domains in one environment, giving organizations a full view of their visitors’ digital and physical identities.
This level of visibility is particularly important in preparing for and responding to a crisis.
Organizations don’t come by access intelligence and a strong emergency preparedness posture by accident. Rather, they’re the result of having the foundational cornerstones in place to foster proactive planning, risk management, readiness, responsiveness, communication and compliance. Those cornerstones include:
Organizations like Lanai Road Elementary know from first-hand experience how important access intelligence is to emergency preparedness and response. Those that combine it with diligent planning and practice will shine when it matters most.
Scott Meyer was named CEO of Sign In App in January 2026 after close to two years as the company’s COO. He has more than 25 years of results-driven experience in cloud-, AI- and SaaS-based technology, including president and board roles at Xenial, Stratix Corporation and Nextep Systems. At Sign In App, Meyer has led the development of AI-first platform innovations designed to simplify the employee and visitor journey while meeting the complex security and GRC needs of today’s businesses.
To learn more about how Sign In App can help your organization strengthen its access intelligence, its emergency preparedness and response, and its overall security posture, while improving the quality of its employee and visitor experiences, visit https://signinapp.com/public-sector-education.
