Blog · 27 August 2026

A school has many more doors than your security budget can cover

Wired access control costs too much per door to reach a whole building. A different architecture, proven across hundreds of customers and thousands of doors, cuts the cost of a managed door by an order of magnitude.

By Mark Linder and Eljas Saastamoinen

Students and a member of staff talking in a timber-lined school corridor, beside a classroom door with an electronic lock and a reader — The corridor, not the front door: a school building is mostly interior doors — classrooms, workshops, storerooms — and those are the ones a wired budget never reaches.

The arithmetic of wired access is not school-budget friendly

Wired access control costs roughly €2,200 per door to install, plus an annual service contract rarely under €100 per door. A fixed security budget covers five doors, or fifteen, out of a building that might have a hundred and fifty.

The entrance gets wired, a few utility rooms also. The rest of the building gets one wired door at a time, until the budget runs out.

This ceiling is set by the architecture, not the budget.

Consider the wiring going away

A Bitwards-enabled lock is an ordinary digital lock with the Bitwards library flashed into its firmware. The capex is only what the lock costs — around €500 installed. Activated with a Bitwards subscription, under €25 a year per door, that lock becomes a fully managed access point.

There is no wiring and no network connection at the door. The lock’s own processor exchanges encrypted tokens with the Bitwards app on the user’s phone; the phone carries permissions to and from the cloud. The system is virtualised end to end — no panels, no controllers, no dedicated wiring.

The administrator sets every permission from a browser. The user authenticates with their phone’s own biometric lock.

Aside from the lock itself, the cost runs under a tenth of a conventional installed door. Now a budget that reached ten doors can reach most of a building.

Interior doors, not just the one at the front

A school day moves people between wings, past storerooms, into areas that shouldn’t be open to whoever is in the building at the time. Bitwards covers the floor plan, not just the entrance.

The same platform extends past the school day. When an evening class or a sports club uses the gym, nobody issues keys or sends a caretaker to lock up. Access is granted for the hours it is needed and expires on its own.

The administrator can delegate defined access to other regular users of the building — an after-school club running its own roster within limits the school sets.

One control point, every managed door

Every door defaults to locked. Because the decision to grant or withdraw access is made in the cloud, not at a panel a caretaker has to reach, an administrator can revoke access across the entire building at once — every managed door, not just the ones that got wired.

The roster updates itself

Your school’s staff and pupil roster probably already lives in Azure AD or a similar system. Bitwards maps access rights to that structure, fully syncs, so nobody re-enters a name a second time.

This automates the function. A pupil added to a class gets classroom access the same day; someone who leaves loses access without anyone remembering to revoke it.

This cuts two specific risks — manual entry errors, and privilege creep, the buildup of access nobody remembers granting. It also means permission requests don’t sit in a queue waiting for support to process them by hand.

Bitwards is fully modern access control. Improvements roll out through the app and the cloud service, so a school doesn’t need new hardware to get them.

The wired doors don’t have to be replaced

Where a school has already wired a handful of entrances, that investment stays in place. An inexpensive controller connects the existing lock to the same platform, so the wired front door and the newly covered classroom sit in one system, managed from one console. The next decision is simply which door to add.

Aalto University runs this model across more than 2,000 doors for 15,000 students — proof it holds at a scale most schools will never need to reach. The budget that used to stop at the front door now reaches the rest of the building.

About Bitwards

Created and built in Espoo, Finland, the Bitwards Unwired Access platform turns any compatible lock into a cloud-managed access point using the smartphone and the lock’s own processor as the infrastructure. The token exchange between phone and lock is patented. Bitwards coexists with wired systems already in place and can be white-labelled or forked to run in a partner’s own environment.

Mark Linder and Eljas Saastamoinen, Bitwards Oy, 27 August 2026. First published on LinkedIn.