How cloud services are impacting physical security
Who would have believed, even a short time ago, that cloud technology would change everything for Physical Security. The enhanced services that security can now deliver to improve safety and save lives is akin to seeing just beyond the headlights and steering away from danger, ahead of time.
I left law enforcement in 2000 and moved to the corporate world when I joined Microsoft Global Security and became responsible for the investigations, operations, and technology teams. During my initial technology review of these teams, I found that most had built specific security IT infrastructure for their needs, using on premise servers and proprietary applications. Physical security managers had become IT system administrators with 24×7 oversight and control. The IT platforms hosted in-house were a collection of compartmentalized solutions put into action over several years to solve individual problems. After reviewing all of our security’s technology platforms we found that the systems were neither scalable nor interoperable, and because there was no strategy behind the technology, the physical security infrastructure was costly and challenging to operate.
As Microsoft has one of the largest corporate IT infrastructures in the world, I questioned the logic of owning and managing our own on premise security servers, believing that we could still effectively control and even enhance our IT services through internal and external partnerships. With the support and leadership of our Chief Security Officer, Mike Howard, we were able to obtain funding for a strategic multi-year physical security technology upgrade. This provided us the opportunity to streamline the 60 different proprietary technology solutions. Our strategy focused on implementing commercial Microsoft off the shelf (COTS) platform-based technology. This technology could be configured instead of customized, already existed within the IT environment, and was developed for business productivity which could also be used for security.
Instead of compartmentalizing security, we stayed consistent with our new strategy and targeted the development of strong partnerships with Microsoft’s IT department. By moving on premise security servers to IT’s hosted environments, we were able to receive 24×7 expert service, with high availability. If there was a technology issue, disaster recovery protocols meant we could rely on our partnership with IT to speedily fix it based on defined service level agreements.
Later, as a Corporation, Microsoft’s strategy included going ‘all in’ to the cloud. Our Global Security team embraced this direction by boldly stating, complete with timeline, our plan to move our physical security technology functions to the cloud. Today, the majority of our physical security technology sits either in a private or hybrid cloud, and more recently includes solutions in the public cloud using SaaS (Software as a Service) hosted by Microsoft Azure. In most cases, freeing the dependency from on premise hosting increases system availability, reduces costs, and, in the current cyber-risk era we live in, ensures systems are up-to-date and as robust as best practices allow.
The fiscal benefit of cloud services is the reduction of capital expenditures. The build out of expensive hardware rich infrastructures, that might only reach peak load periodically, is a thing of the past. Many platform-based cloud services come with client offline synchronization. An example of this type of resiliency is the interoperable capabilities of Microsoft’s three Global Security Operations Centers(GSOCs). Leveraging the many applications now in the cloud, our GSOCs share responsibilities across geographies and time zones through operational load sharing. The hardware used in the centers is portable, easy to un-dock and move in case of an evacuation or emergency. This allows the other GSOCs to easily manage operations during an incident until the affected SOC takes back operational control.
The cloud is not confined to large corporate enterprises like Microsoft. I regularly keep in touch with officers in the law enforcement community. Many of them, faced with limited IT support and budgets, have adopted cloud solutions to help with many aspects of their needs from citizen engagement, crime reporting, case management, all the way through to prosecution. These new capabilities increase productivity, enhance front line policing and, with the next generation of business intelligence tools, enable patterns to be identified, providing officers with actionable intelligence to help fight crime. How far has this come in a relatively short period of time? Well, today we talk about mobility and “Bring your own devices”, when only a few years back in my early police days that meant buying yourself an electronic typewriter and taking it to the police station!
With shrinking budgets and limited technology improvement opportunities, private and public organizations are accustomed to being forced to do more with less. Today, with even less, they can do much more with the cloud.
This article was originally published in Security Solutions Magazine. Read the cover story here.
