Don’t Ignore the Problems that Consolidation of Your Security and IT Environments Could Create .

Now more than ever, businesses are looking to their access control security, video surveillance and IT environments to allow for more efficient, secured and flexible operations with higher than optimal service levels.

The concept of consolidation of networks and servers has been around for quite some time. It has been an ongoing trend being seen by many organizations and industries. Now more than ever, businesses are evaluating the most efficient ways to operate and create environments that don’t always require additional onsite overhead but that still provide the same performance levels. Virtualizing the servers that house your access control security system and video surveillance systems can be a wise shift which will ripple many benefits on your organization such as:

1. Reduce the hefty investment in hardware.
2. Diminish operational costs and excess overhead.
3. Migrate away from legacy equipment and make your environment more accessible across your organization, but only to those who need access.
4. Create an environment that fosters a more efficient utilization rate.
5. Virtualizing the systems in the cloud serves as a backup.

However, while consolidating comes with many benefits, there are critical areas that shouldn’t be overlooked as you approach this endeavor.

The effect on your access control security system.

The problem: By shifting away from a distributed model where you may have 50 independent systems, you also reduce the administrative support.  At first this would seem great from a security and IT perspective. Consolidating the work also reduces the overhead and operational costs.  However, consider the administrative workload when it comes to moves, adds, changes and badge printing for your access control security system.  Who would be responsible for shipping out badges to new hires? These are important areas that can’t be overlooked and could cause bottlenecking in an organization when the workload gets backed up.

The solution:  Consolidating with a managed services provider creates opportunity for this to happen. Through people, processes and technology, a managed services provider can support this workload within their service agreement. Overhead and operational costs stay low on the customer side but the administrative work on the access control system is completed in a timely manner, as if you still had the expanded internal team.

The effect on your video surveillance systems.

The problem: If you’re considering consolidation of your video surveillance systems, then you need to look at the effect on the video that is sitting on the network and the network speeds.  For example, if you’re at a manufacturing plant that has 30 cameras and the server is onsite, then it’s on the local network which  is fast.  The minute you take it offsite, it’s inevitably going to slow the connection given that it is being shared by all departments.

Solution 1:  A managed services provider can put solutions in place to create fast connection speeds through throttling.  More advanced video surveillance systems can cache it and drip it back to the central server. Another efficient solution would be to incorporate advanced analytics and only store what you need versus 24/7 recorded footage that takes up a substantial amount of space.

Solution 2: An in-house video monitoring central station is costly and cumbersome when it comes to the technology and resources needed. You can eliminate these variables by virtualizing your security guard force and leveraging analytics within your video monitoring systems.  You can also set the analytics to only detect motion or a human which takes up far less space on your server.

Be mindful of the need for disaster recovery when consolidating.

Virtualizing access control security and video surveillance systems into the cloud will provide automatic disaster recovery for your environment.  However, if you are consolidating legacy equipment, then it is important that you have disaster recovery designed into the solution. In a traditional distributed model, if one server failed, it wouldn’t have an effect on other sites.  When you consolidate, all eggs are in one basket which makes it critical to design a redundant solution.

 

At Star Asset Security, one of our core values is to think outside the box so we can put together creative solutions to help our customers solve problems, drive their business forward and enhance their physical security and IT networks. Visit www.securethinking.com to learn more today.