What is Physical Security as a Service?

In the decade or so since the widespread adoption of the Internet, Web-based application services and pay-per-use business models have established Software as a Service (SaaS) as the dominant new paradigm for application deployment and delivery.

Unbeknownst to much of the IT community, that same time period saw physical security product offerings finally catching up with the broader market’s nearly universal use of native IP networking technology. For the physical security industry, this switch to IP—from digital cameras to networked access control panels to browser-based user interfaces—was revolutionary in moving the industry out of the guard station and into the data center.

These two technology trends have merged with a general shift toward hosted, service-based offerings in which vendors manage technology roles formerly handled by end user IT staff. The result—as in numerous other business application domains where outsourcing has proven its value—is that physical security is now moving to “the cloud” and using SaaS to deliver better services, more reliably, with lower TCO.

We call this “Physical Security-as-a-Service,” or PSaaS, and it’s the exclusive focus of Cloud Cover.

What you’ll find here is an ongoing discussion of the issues unique to the delivery of physical security with Web-hosted applications. Some of the topics you can expect to see are:

• What it is and how it works.
• What services are available today.
• The business case for SaaS in physical security applications.
• How cyber-security and privacy are managed in physical-security-critical cloud applications.
• The relationship between on-premise security equipment and SaaS services.
• Case studies of real end-users and how SaaS worked for them.
• Future trends in cloud-based physical security management.

Like any blog, this is intended to be an interactive forum, and we hope for your comments and feedback to help enliven this discussion as we cross this new frontier together.

-Steve Van Till