Editor’s Note: This is the eighth in a series of interviews with session leaders for the GSO 2025 event, scheduled to take place in Bali on November 2nd and 3rd, 2022.® (formerly VariDesk®) Our global headquarters are located near the DFW airport in Irving, Texas. The event is future-dated because we need to look three to five years ahead to see where security leadership and security technology are headed. registration is open for business.
Editorial Director Steve Lasky recently became a noted security consultant, author, and security technology executive magazines and writers of Security business Magazine and SecurityInfoWatch.com. Steve asked about his second day of the GSO 2025 Summit focusing on technology thinking.
SIWs: How do you say that our technology thinking today is still outdated?
Bernard: The information technology we use to build our security systems has changed dramatically and continues to do so at an ever-accelerating pace. That fact is now common knowledge, but the ramifications of the situation have not been fully considered. The physical security industry has not fully considered the impact of major IT trends and remains primarily product focused. The industry is years behind IT in terms of IT thinking and design practices.
SIWs: Can you be more specific?
Bernard: There are several examples, but I will introduce the representative ones. Most companies, especially large ones, are undertaking digital transformation initiatives to advance the way they work and do business. They use advanced information technology in their data centers and even at the edge, which in some industries means on-premises or external data centers.
This advanced technology is much more scalable and upgradeable than what is used for physical security, with the exception of some cloud-based offerings. New technologies enable companies to drive change and growth. I have a strong obsession with data. Information technology enables companies to better understand themselves, gain greater insight into their operations, and gain the agility to continuously optimize how their business operates.
This is made possible by recent advances in software-defined IT infrastructures that provide virtualized compute, storage, and network components that can be easily managed at any scale. These software-defined elements have a level of redundancy and fault tolerance not achievable with the outdated hardware architectures used for physical security systems.
New technology breakthroughs have made it possible to add or replace computing, data storage, and networking hardware without disrupting software applications and their data exchange. Add, remove, or replace hardware without shutting down the system.
You don’t need highly skilled or heavily staffed IT operations to deploy and maintain such a software-defined infrastructure. Software Defined Computing Platform manage yourself Take advantage of built-in redundancy and failover capabilities to automatically update software-defined elements, virtual machines, and the applications running on them when hardware changes.
In IT terms, this is Autonomous Computing Infrastructure, First time hearing from Dell Technologies. This is the equivalent of self-driving cars in the IT industry. It is the current state-of-the-art in cloud computing technology and can now also be deployed as an on-premises device for the on-site component of a physical security system.
Such an infrastructure provides 99.9999% uptime for all applications and eliminates the need for third-party failover software or dedicated video failover recorders. The redundancy and fault tolerance capabilities of the physical security industry’s traditional approach to server-based deployments Autonomous computing infrastructure ability. With a software-defined platform, the application architecture is completely independent of the hardware and is not constrained or restricted by the hardware like traditional physical security systems.
SIWs: Can such a system be installed by a security integrator?
Bernard: yes. For example, Dell Autonomous Computing Platforms ship as turnkey systems that are lab-certified for security applications running on them. It can be installed and powered up in no time. Their deployment no longer included the labor-intensive and error-prone human IT tasks that were previously necessary for her.
These can be installed by security integrators in minutes or hours instead of days or weeks. There is an upgrade path to move from existing legacy systems to such new technology in a smart way. This includes a mix of cloud applications and legacy technologies that don’t yet need to be upgraded.
For the first time in the history of physical security technology, how can in-place systems evolve to incorporate new technologies, additional applications and integrations, and support new devices while minimizing application downtime for security system applications? , can continue to run without stopping at all.
Another important point is that the computing hardware built to support this intelligent infrastructure approach has strong cybersecurity capabilities similar to those used for secure cloud computing infrastructure. is built in.
SIW: What new thinking do you need?
Bernard: It doesn’t have to be difficult. It’s just different from what we’ve been doing for years. Rather than designing an evolving computing infrastructure as a platform that can support both current and future applications, we install individual products and design hardware based on their short-term requirements. I have focused on doing.
For example, we currently purchase an on-premises video management system pre-installed on our own servers. If there is fault tolerance, its limited to his VMS server only. Usually this means RAID for storage. For a large number of recording servers, this means days of rebuild times and subpar performance. This is why many VMS systems do not use RAID for recording servers and are not fault tolerant. Having a separate failover server for each application is not cost-effective. This is why most security system applications cannot survive server failures.
Managing an on-premises security system deployed in this manner is complex. Because each application has its own hardware that must be handled separately. Purchasing separate hardware for each system is costly. Most hardware upgrades require a system shutdown. Systems don’t scale incrementally and need to be over-provisioned for future growth, which is a waste.
We use this diagram to show how IT is moving in this direction for physical security systems. Years ago, the IT world realized that the piecemeal approach that had been used to deploy nearly all physical security systems resulted in high hardware and operating costs and the lack of the guaranteed security that critical security systems require. I just learned that I can’t provide uptime.
take Evolvable Intelligent Infrastructure With this approach, you simply add or upgrade a portion of your infrastructure’s hardware pool, tell your infrastructure management console (a software application) which applications get compute, storage, or network resources, and you’re ready to go. scale compute, storage, or network resources for your applications. Expanded.
Automatically scale virtualized resources without shutting down the system. Significantly reduce the cost of managing your hardware infrastructure. The computer, storage, and network resources allocated to your application can be increased or decreased incrementally. This is much more efficient and easier to manage.
There is still much more to say on this topic. The GSO 2025 event will do just that, including demonstrations of technology capabilities.
SIW: Good luck and look forward to sharing more with you at GSO 2025 this fall.
Bernard: Thank you Steve. He will have many insightful discussions at his GSO 2025 event at Vari headquarters.
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