Managing 1510 facility keys inside a Grade I listed museum

As a Grade I listed building, the Natural History Museum's Waterhouse building can't be altered to fit modern infrastructure: exchanging doors, cutting cable runs, or fitting standard card readers into listed fabric wasn't an option anywhere on site. Yet the museum still had to manage a very large number of facility keys — 1510 in total — securely and traceably, across a building where its existing key cabinets needed to be replaced.

The museum, as a public institution, ran a public tender for a replacement key management system — one that had to fit the building's listed status, work without new network cabling, and integrate with the access control platform already in place across the site.

ecos won the Natural History Museum's public tender to replace its facility key cabinets, installing ecos key cabinets across multiple buildings on site to manage all 1510 keys from a single software. ecos cabinets support dynamic return: a key taken from one cabinet can be returned to any other cabinet, matching how staff actually move around a large, multi-building site rather than forcing them back to a single point.

With no way to run new network cables through the listed fabric of the building, every cabinet connects over the mobile network instead — avoiding any need for cable runs or wall penetrations. Behind that connection sits ecos care, combining communication, software and backup-as-a-Service, chosen in part for its ISO 27001 certification, giving the museum the level of information security assurance it needed for a system managing access to a nationally significant collection. Every cabinet is also integrated with the museum's existing Gallagher access control system, so key access follows the same authentication already used for the rest of the site.

The move to ecos key cabinets went smoothly: onboarding staff onto the new system and switching over from the museum's previous cabinets was seamless and easy — with none of the disruption a change like this could have caused across a site handling millions of visitors a year. Staff have particularly welcomed how straightforward the key cabinets are to use day to day but also the added comfort with the mobile app.

With all 1510 facility keys now managed through one dynamic, mobile-connected system, the Natural History Museum has a single, auditable standard for key security.