The 5 Cs of Security as a Service

The 5th C...Coverage

Coverage
Organizations often find that the best way to accelerate profitable growth is through geographic expansion. Expansion comes with significant challenges, risks, and expenses. Management teams will be extended a bit further, along with scarce company resources. Solutions that provide good results in one location or at small campus can turn troublesome when multiplied for many geographically dispersed sites. Typically, these types of installations expose the vulnerabilities, complexities, and hidden expenses of traditional client/server solutions.

Security as a Service solutions provide very clear benefits for organizations with geographically dispersed sites. The low initial costs and wide scalability of SaaS solutions give organizations access to world-class technologies with an economic model that promotes expansion rather than restricting it. Securely using the public Internet as a communication medium greatly simplifies the deployment of remote sites for IT Departments. Best yet, the centrally hosted SaaS model provides all the central oversight and management that is needed in well run organizations without requiring costly investments in dedicated infrastructure.

It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to have to paint it, Steven Wright

A SaaS-based security platform gives you the power to drop an access control point anywhere in world and have it communicating, configured, and controlling your facility in a matter of hours. With complete synchronization to your master database and with total audit capability from wherever you happen to be. With the complexity of local software and hardware configurations removed from the equation, installers with modest training can successfully implement a SaaS based physical access control solution.

Illustration: SaaS in Physical Security Today

Brivo introduced SaaS into the security industry in 2001. The company offers a hosted Security Management System that provides centralized access control, video surveillance, notifications, and related services. As shown below, the SaaS applications connect to a variety of on-premise security equipment ranging from cameras to control panels and other sensors.

This architecture eliminates the need to have applications running at each secured property, which eliminates the expense and headaches of the local computing resources that have been the Achilles ’ heel of legacy security systems. Instead, it relies on a centrally hosted platform for identity, device, and asset management; as well as all alerts, alarms, email notifications, and general reporting. Multiple data centers throughout the US provide redundancy and disaster recovery capability, with SAS-70 audits to provide assurance on information security and compliance concerns.

-John Szczygiel