Introducing Physical Security Cloud Services

By Shayne P. Bates CCSK, CPP, CHS-V, DABCHS

Source: The Great Conversation Blog,

Introduction

Without question, we are highly dependent on computing technology to be effective security practitioners. Without it, even with reduced capacity, our effectiveness to manage enterprise risk is significantly impacted. Therefore, doesn’t it make sense to explore how we can optimize our effectiveness as security practitioners through the use of technology?

What does cloud computing mean to the business of physical security, what are the opportunities, and why should I pay attention?

A Generational Change is Underway (again)

The generational change in computing that occurred when technology transformed from mainframes to PCs and servers had enormous economic implications: most mainframes were rendered a relic of a bygone era due to their need to be optimized for efficiency because of their high cost. Mainframes were quickly replaced by distributed storage and compute, which was optimized for agility due to the low cost. The explosion of networking and bandwidth helped fuel a whole new era in which inexpensive operating systems were licensed perpetually, replacing the legacy model of high upfront costs for hardware and software.

High cost necessitates efficiency and low cost enables agility. We are constantly reminded of this principal as we discard our gadgets in favor of new ones that are smarter, cheaper and faster. Gone is the notion of repair when tempted by the economics and promise of something better and almost immediate.

Today, we are seeing the explosive scale-out of large data centers with commodity hardware, which is an order of magnitude better in efficiency and agility.

Speed and Cost are Great Partners

Add to this the reality that organizations do not require every application to be custom. Ask your team this: for those applications that are custom, can we justify the high cost of ownership and managing it ourselves? Why? In many cases, if confidentiality, Integrity and availability are satisfactorily addressed, applications that are hosted in data centers, and delivered by high speed networks to commodity devices, become very appealing for reasons of agility and economics. Share this cost on a large scale across many customers globally, and a potent tool is delivered to enable the third generational change in computing: The Cloud.

It’s in the Math: Capex V Opex

There is one important cloud principle worth understanding: economy of scale . Why commit precious capital to own something when you can pay less to use it for a period of time while it meets your needs, and then hand it back, or move it elsewhere when you are done? This principle is popular for many services we consume today, such as rental cars and utility services like phone, gas and electric; rather than having to acquire and manage your own.

The basic doctrine of project management teaches us that “there is good, fast and cheap: pick any two” (performance, time and cost), or at least decide the balance you desire. Add scope to the equation and one way of viewing cloud economics is a balance of these four items.

The Cloud: Way More Than Just Cost Savings

Putting aside the economics for a moment , ask “what can I do with a security cloud that I cannot with our system today?” The answer is many new things – complementary with the economic benefits, to enable the emergence of a new stream of security services. The five key characteristics of the cloud are:

• On Demand Self Service – what automated services could we deliver for customers to serve themselves without the wait (and bill them for it)?
• Resource Pooling – what is the impact of pooling and dynamically assigning resources to serve multiple consumers?
• Measured Service – how can we leverage the benefits of monitoring, optimizing, controlling and reporting resource use transparently?
• Broad network Access – what new capabilities could we deliver over the network to standard mechanisms and appliances?
• Rapid Elasticity – what could we do with virtually unlimited computing power for a period of time that we determine?

 Security Convergence Has a Child

Much discussion occurred around the convergent nature of information and physical security, and it’s still occurring. Suffice to say, the security cloud can be viewed as a product of the two. For the adequate provision of physical security cloud services (PSCS), a symbiosis occurs between physical and information security for effective enterprise security risk management (ESRM) to serve the needs of the business. Cloud is one of the best examples of a tightly coupled partnership between physical and IT security.

Conclusion

Physical security technologies and services will be rapidly redefined as innovators understand how to leverage the agility, low cost and unlimited compute of the cloud, at a fraction of the cost, using cloud scaled resources. What was unthinkable a few short years ago is becoming reality as new tools emerge to reduce the risk of harm, and secure assets and reputations.