Cover Story - To the edge of tomorrow

To the edge of tomorrow

Tech-celeration in the security industry by Duncan Cooke, Business Development, Stratus Technologies with contribution from Richard Huison, Regional General Manager for UK & Europe, Gallagher

The security industry, like every industry, is in an era of rapid change as digital transformation (DX) takes hold and revolutionises what is possible. Over the past 18 months, in part due to the global pandemic, DX adoption has proliferated around the world. This so-called tech-celeration has a profound impact on the security industry but it is far from a step into the unknown. What, exactly does the tech-celeration mean for the security industry? It means building highly capable and flexible security solutions that can do more than ever before, with less. It means a combined software and hardware approach with resilience designed in at every stage, from the data centre to the edge of the network. It means simple, secure and autonomous security solutions, fit for tomorrow.

Tech-celeration

The term tech-celeration was coined by The Economist in a recent article that quotes McKinsey research in consumer and digital adoption . According to McKinsey, the shutdowns of the pandemic caused a five-year leap in digital adoption in just eight weeks. The effects and implications of the pandemic are easy to observe in the security industry. Almost overnight, people, including security managers, were working remotely, social distancing was required for those who needed to be onsite, and security suddenly included healthcare considerations such as body temperature monitoring and contact tracing.

Despite the new circumstances and pressures of the pandemic, and despite the ‘new normal’ which is taking shape as the world slowly emerges from Covid-19, the security industry is actually not taking a big step into the unknown.

The reason we can see the future of security so clearly is because we are talking about an acceleration in the adoption of digital transformation. The technology required to meet today’s challenges already exists, and the right technology is flexible.

But… digital transformation demands that we take a holistic

view of security. It is driven by a combination of factors that are human, technological and process related. It requires an approach to security which includes both software and hardware, and most importantly it needs to deliver gapless data, available in real time.

Security by Command

The very best security software integrates solutions and provides complete site control from one central management platform.

Fully configurable to meet the unique needs of individual sites, Command Centre from Gallagher provides centralised site visibility and monitoring, ensuring situational awareness for all buildings, and the perimeter, on both local and remote sites. Information is displayed in realtime, allowing a quick and accurate response to security threats, while data visualisation and reporting enables operational decisions to be made with greater precision.

Fully scalable, Command Centre supports future growth and changing security requirements. Compliant with many global standards, Command Centre helps organisations streamline their systems across multiple locations.

Command Centre is designed with people, business, building, and site management in mind. From keeping people safe with intelligent access control, powerful emergency response capabilities, mobile access solutions, and simple, effective cardholder and credential management. Through to ensuring business continuity and operational flow with efficient management of workforce compliance and safety. Organisations can create efficiencies through integration with building management systems to reduce energy costs, identify critical faults early, and support modern work environments. Along with protecting people and assets through enhanced site monitoring and situational awareness, alarm management, effective perimeter security, advanced reporting, and flexible mobile solutions, all controlled from one powerful platform.

Edge

Bringing together so much functionality requires an IT platform that is highly capable. With so many peripheral and smart devices with multiple applications, a dispersed computing solution is desirable. The issue here is not simply one of computing power, but more about getting the right computing capability and capacity where it is needed.

New IoT devices such as Thermal Cameras, Motion Sensors, HVAC Control, Air Quality and Smart Thermostats can generate “big” data, which requires processing and actioning at the Edge, in real time. The result is an increasing demand for Edge-based compute solutions to support multiple applications, and to do this efficiently, the right platform will need to have a virtualisation capability.

It’s worth coming back to the point about tech-celeration here, since the context for deployments of Edge Computing is changing rapidly. In terms of the people and skills available for an Edge Computing architecture, such resources are scarce and getting scarcer. Furthermore, given its distributed nature, and the fact that many sites might be associated with a single Command Centre , the Edge Computing deployment will often need to run at a ‘five nines’ (99.999%) level of availability with no IT support whatsoever – a ‘zero-touch control’ approach. Such considerations mean that the right Edge Computing platform must be simple for operational (non IT) staff to deploy and maintain, as

well as being inherently resilient. In terms of cyber security, the right Edge Computing platform adds an important layer of security to IoT peripherals – especially if it is designed with a holistic and operator-specific set of security tools. What’s important here, given the range of vendor solutions available and that are likely to be linked to the platform, is sourcing a platform that is vendor agnostic. Returning to the Command Centre software for a moment, and the automation that helps deliver many of its benefits, it is also vital that the Edge Computing platform has the same level of automation available to create a truly connected and controllable ‘system of systems’ security strategy.

Resilience

As much as we in the security industry dislike the word ‘unknown’, we love the word ‘resilience’. We certainly prefer it to ‘recovery’ and with resilience designed-in, the need to recover from a failure or an outage is reduced. With the best Edge Computing platforms capable of offering that simple, protected, and autonomous platform with a minimum of five-nines uptime, recovery from IT related issues will rarely be an issue. A strong resilient Edge Computing system is comprised of two identical nodes, running in a redundant pair for greater reliability. The system can monitor itself, and workloads running in virtual machines (VM) are automatically moved between nodes – a process known as live migration - if the system detects that a potential failure is likely. Such a system can mix and match resources across both nodes, like CPU, memory, storage, or networking, to ensure the overall system has what it needs and continues to run. For example, the VM can use the CPU and storage in one node, and the memory and networking card in the other node, if necessary to ensure application availability and deliver that always-on peace of mind.

But disaster scenarios are endless – certain geographical incidents (such as fire, natural disaster, or malign intent) could knock out a whole Edge set up, even those running in a fully redundant configuration. These too can be prevented if the correct Edge Computing platform is used.

It is possible for the two nodes of an Edge system to be deployed miles apart, as long as there is a suitable network connection between them. This capability allows the Edge Platform to be deployed in a local site area Disaster Recovery (DR) configuration. Applications that are running in one Command Centre can restart in another, often within minutes, and without any operator intervention. There are complications if the two nodes are split by more than 10 metres or so (so-called split-brain) scenarios – but even they can be managed out with the correct ‘quorum service’ set up – which a good system integrator will be able to help implement.

The true cost of downtime

Having offered a brief overview of what is possible at the sharp end of security systems in the age of digital transformation, it’s worth noting that not all security systems have the same requirements.

The best way to understand quickly if Edge Computing is the right approach for your organisation, is to ask the simple question: what does downtime cost my organisation – or perhaps more pertinently, what might downtime cost my business. If the realisation is that critical applications absolutely must be simple, protected, autonomous, and always-on, then resilient Edge Computing is the right step towards digital transformation. The business case is already made, before consideration of improvements, efficiencies and the like are brought to bear.

Moreover, if the pandemic has resulted in the need for your security system to have much more competence in terms of additional processes or peripherals, with much less resource in terms of IT competence or staff to manage it, then a resilient Edge solution is also the right next step in your digital transformation journey.

It is not, as mentioned previously, a step into the unknown. Highly autonomous, simple, protected, and resilient Edge to Enterprise combined hardware and software solutions are already being used by various high security sites, including government owned and managed premises, airports, military facilities, and the like. The resilience at the heart of such systems has a pedigree in financial transactions (such as banking and credit-card payment systems) where a moment of downtime is measured in millions of dollars of lost transactions. While elements of such systems – such as the emerging compute capabilities at the Edge – are newer and benefit from ruggedised hardware suitable for computing outside of the server room, they are available and well established.

The tech-celeration has brought forward the point of need for such solutions to be deployed by a huge number of organisations the world over. It has, you might say, brought us to the Edge of tomorrow. Digital transformation has well and truly arrived for the security industry, and it is a good thing.

For more information, please visit www.stratus.com