Depends a bit on the lock or access system. As of right now, most smart locks out there are still using a combination of zigbee, zwave, or bluetooth. This means that if you want remote control, you need to bridge them over to TCP/IP. We have a multiprotocol hub that we've developed for this. The hub itself isn't always required per say. For example, we're starting to see wifi locks. They generally have much lower battery life, but they eliminate the need for additional hardware, which is great. For bluetooth locks (e.g. August), we're looking at also building a single mobile SDK that would work with the various brands. This is really tricky because this requires a lot of reverse engineering.
Ironically the company that produces the lockboxes used in the story for this item also has door locks that use the same one time code mechanism (similar to Google Auth). No network connectivity required. I was never interested in putting a lock that had any kind of Internet requirement, but now I'm very interested in this one.