Securing thousands of customer keys with exact traceability

As part of its object protection and patrol services, ÖWD holds the keys to thousands of customer premises in trust — from private residences to commercial and industrial sites across Austria. For a security company built on trust, that responsibility comes with a strict requirement: clear, exact traceability of who took which key, and when, is mandatory, not optional.

At ÖWD's scale that meant finding a way to securely store and log thousands of individual keys per region, without slowing down the guards and technicians who need to check them in and out throughout the day.

ecos systems rolled out large-capacity key cabinets to ÖWD starting in the Salzburg region, with 1,080 key slots installed to bring exact traceability to that office's full key inventory.

Building on that first deployment, ecos extended the rollout to ÖWD's Eastern Austria region around Vienna, installing 2,880 additional key slots — for a combined 3,960 keys now secured across the two regions. Every cabinet is connected through ecos care + access, ecos' cloud-based platform for remote monitoring and access management, so ÖWD can administer key access centrally rather than location by location.

Every key issuance and return is logged automatically and tied to the individual who took it, giving ÖWD an exact, auditable record for every one of the thousands of keys now in its custody.

The rollout gives the company a consistent, centrally administered standard for key custody that scales with its footprint, and a template it can extend to its remaining locations as it continues to grow.