The 5 Cs of Security as a Service

The 4th C…Continuity

The 5 Cs continues with yet another in our reasons why end-users are quickly moving to Security as a Service. The 4th C is for Continuity.

Continuity
Our collective experiences with events such as September 11 2001, Hurricane Katrina, and a host of other disasters and outages have brought into clear focus the need for redundancy and resiliency in the systems that support our organizations. It’s not enough to ask how well are we protected or how many back-ups exist, but also how fast can we resume operations if everything goes wrong?

Organizations routinely spend hundreds of thousands of dollars creating resiliency in their physical security platforms. This commonly includes hot-standby computers, back-up power sources, and disaster recovery locations. These measures are not only expensive; they are often reliant on internal computer networks that are likely to be challenged by any form of massive disaster. Further, if employees cannot get to the machines that operate the security platform, all the redundant measure may be fruitless. While security is certainly a high priority, if an organization’s core revenue generating capabilities are down, what will be addressed first?

Fortunately, the SaaS model provides numerous answers for these types of challenges. Multi-tenant SaaS services are normally hosted in highly reliable data centers with built-in redundancy. The best providers also employ separate disaster recovery centers to restore full operations if the primary center is disabled. Redundancy in the communication path is built into this model due to the Internet’s capability to send information via a large number of routes. Even if broadband service is down, it’s possible to establish the same communication paths via cellular cards and cellular equipped access panels. Since no special computers or software is required to operate a SaaS-based physical security application, any computer connected to the Internet can be placed into service during an emergency.

The redundancy and disaster recovery capabilities of the SaaS model are even more remarkable when you consider that it’s all part of the basic service and thus is available at the same level of quality for consumers with one reader or one thousand readers.

-John Szczygiel