Rethinking physical security creates new partner opportunities

Today, many organisations have realised that it's no longer sufficient to risk the robustness of an organisation's physical security infrastructure by using outdated, inefficient, and ineffective security methods. As a result, many are choosing to run their physical security assets using a hybrid of existing on-premises and as-a-service/cloud-based models. 

A hybrid-cloud infrastructure model allows physical security to be housed on the platform that is best suited to an enterprise's requirements. For some, this could be a public cloud such as Microsoft Azure while others will perform better running on hardware within a corporate or hosted data centre.

Such designs, which can comprise a mix of on-premises, hosted, and public cloud resources, are being recognised as a means of delivering value, capacity, and flexibility amid constantly changing market conditions. At the same time, this enables organisations to retain their current investments and blend in SaaS and cloud-enabled capabilities over time to underpin innovation and derive further value from their physical security infrastructure.

Research conducted by Genetec has showed a 275%¹ increase in the number of end users wanting to take more physical security workloads to the cloud. Research also indicates that many organisations aren't treating SaaS and cloud as an 'all or nothing' proposition. 

However, while a hybrid-cloud infrastructure provides flexibility, it also has implications in being the gateway to the physical security cloud journey. Organisations needs to ensure that there are tools in place that can protect data regardless of their location. 

The recent Genetec empower360 Channel Partner Roadshow across Australia and New Zealand focused on discussions about why the time is now right for this hybrid model. Dialogue led to the exploration of opportunities afforded to channel partners who seize the opportunity to assist their customers in the transition to this new model for physical security. Indeed, partners have advised that 93%² of their deployments will be cloud or hybrid-cloud in the next five years. So, what is driving physical security to the cloud?

Maintaining currency encourages innovation

Australian and New Zealand organisations demand that their physical security solution remains feature rich and maintains pace with advanced capability updates in the solution they use to manage their physical security environments. At the same time, they're demanding one system to learn, adopt, deploy, and manage.

Organisations that aren't able to keep up with the upgrade cycle often become subject to the consumption gap. This is where the end user can see the platform evolving with new features and functionality, but are unable to take advantage of all of it. The bigger the consumption gap, the more likely it's to be holding the organisation back from physical security best practices.

SaaS promises to close that gap because it keeps organisations on the latest software version.  Importantly, their solution is updated in a way that is pre-approved by the organisation and on a timeframe of their choosing.

As a trusted adviser to the end user, the system integrator has the ability to advise their customer on the upgrades and make assessments on the organisation's hardware portfolio.

Advanced capabilities are brought within reach

SaaS models are also becoming popular for physical security solution delivery as they make advanced capabilities accessible to businesses of any size. Indeed, any enterprise can now take advantage of best-in-class enterprise grade cloud physical security once thought to have considered to be outside a budget scope. 

Flexing to changing business needs

SaaS based software is also gaining ground in physical security is that it offers increased flexibility compared to exclusively on-premises software. This can allow organisations to onboard new physical security assets, such as cameras and access control readers, much faster. 

Businesses with numerous locations need to consider each site's unique physical security requirements with advice from their system integrator. For instance, they might run all their physical security systems on local servers and networks at their headquarters locations, choose a full-cloud deployment for smaller remote sites, while another location might require cloud connectivity with additional storage on site. 

Organisations can extend the functionality of on-premises, server-based systems or create a bridge to the cloud to modernise their existing infrastructure. This can be done by simply adding cloud-connected appliances, adding devices with cloud-based software and storage, implementing remote sites with cloud solutions, or running specific applications in the cloud. This hybrid solution allows them to keep on-premises servers for existing technologies and uses as well as add other security and business components or systems as needed. The sheer flexibility and scalability of the cloud simplifies expansions by accommodating many different objectives, uses, and durations.

Meeting regulatory requirements

Many Australian organisations with physical security infrastructure must meet sovereignty requirements. These include conforming to the Australian Signals Directorate Essential Eight and IRAP Assessment cyber threat mitigation strategies to comply with how they store data.

As a result, more entities are turning to secure and sovereign hosted cloud storage to meet these requirements. In this case, organisations can easily choose to keep longer-term video and data archives in the cloud while storing short-term archives on local on-premises servers. Other organisations are realising the value of cloud storage by using it to back up video and data archives. If anything issues occur to the physical servers, companies can rest assured that their most critical security information is safely stored in the cloud and is easily accessible on demand. 

Seizing the opportunity to embrace the hybrid-cloud

For physical security channel partners, designing and maintaining a cloud infrastructure affords key opportunities for working ever more closely with customers. These include:

Working with customers to understand their physical IT environment:
Knowing what your customers have in place is a key first step. Carefully assessing the entire infrastructure, applications, and data serves to take guesswork out of the equation and streamline the migration process.

Unfortunately, many organisations may not have a clear picture of their overall physical security environment and don't know what applications they have and where those applications reside. 

Working with customers to review all data: 
For maximum efficiency, it's important that data is stored on the most appropriate platform. For example, transactional data may be best suited to a high-performance public cloud, while file backups may be best stored on an on-premises, legacy server. Channel partners can support their customers by undertaking an audit of data stored across an organisation and confirm location optimisation.

Support for assessing different cloud options:
There are a range of public cloud platforms on offer, so it's important for partners to support customers to assess which might be the best fit for a particular business. Factors to consider include performance, operational costs, data sovereignty and levels of reliability.

Maintaining flexibility in design:
Creating and maintaining a hybrid-cloud infrastructure isn't a set-and-forget proposition. Partners should work with their customers to regularly assess the evolving cloud platform landscape and ensure the mix that they have in place is delivering the maximum value to their organisation. 

Undertaking critical assessments
Ensure you have a robust security framework developed and understand your customers' cloud security posture. Develop visibility and management across the entire physical security environment so that today's unified solutions, which combine access control, video management, intrusion monitoring, automated license plate recognition and other advanced security capabilities can be optimally deployed.

Hybrid-cloud infrastructures are clearly here to stay. End user organisations that take advantage of them for their customers with the assistance of their channel partners stand to gain from improved performance, lower costs, and increased agility.