While the need to deliver superior customer (internal or external) service is driving enterprises towards rapid digital transformation, they are increasingly recognizing the challenges it brings along.
One of the critical aspects is the management of Physical Security (which is trending into more converged technology security) in this era marked by heightened security threats and challenges. In new age enterprises, employee experience and safety depend on infrastructure & services that they experience daily, some visible and some behind the scenes!
For someone responsible for overall Security and Business Resiliency, complete visibility into every aspect of the operation is of paramount importance in maintaining a robust and secure infrastructure. Manual and isolated methods of managing are time-consuming and error prone, resulting in increased costs. They fall short in providing visibility into the complex infrastructure, leading to IT teams in a perpetual reactive mode when devices underperform or fail. Such an approach ultimately hampers business productivity, compromises security and increases Business Risk.
Enhancing efficiency while prioritizing Safety & Security
A large, hi-tech-multi-national, a customer of #SmartHub.ai, traditionally executed routine manual audits to verify the operational status of all cameras and address any malfunctions. This approach had inherent limitations, characterized by a significant margin of oversight and the potential for human errors. Certain cameras would occasionally cease functioning in the interval between scheduled audits. In scenarios where critical cameras (monitoring critical locations) were affected, this lapse in surveillance could potentially jeopardize the safety and security of both the infrastructure and individuals. Furthermore, instances of intrusion and theft would remain unresolved, as these incidents would not be investigated when cameras were offline.
In the past few years, they have moved from a manual / siloed setup (largely a result of multiple technologies and vendors) to unified management, to monitor and remediate issues across all their physical security components including surveillance cameras, NVRs (Network Video Recorder) and access control, regardless of their make, model, or protocol.
A huge challenge was to seamlessly manage tens of thousands of devices (and makes/models) across multiple geographical locations, to ensure the safety of critical infrastructure, and safety and security of the entire organization. It was critical to have visibility into and control across the complex, myriad edge technologies to enable quick decision making and generate quick real time alerts across the globe.
Today, their operations team is quickly notified of anomalies, and immediate alerts are brought to the attention for action, thanks to SmartHub DEFENDᵀᴹ.
In fact, quite often, the platform’s self-healing mechanisms resolve issues automatically, minimizing potential downtime due to misconfigurations or an update. While no business can afford a downtime, imagine the amount of technician hours saved in manual checks of multiple sophisticated components.
Benefits of moving to unified edge management platform goes beyond monitoring, managing, and securing
Data-driven predictive failure analysis helps surface issues because of the huge amount of data that is gathered about the performant state and failures across the edge security deployment. This not only helps in tracking uptime but also provides valuable insights for preventative maintenance, allowing scheduling of maintenance and version upgrades proactively and optimally.
- SmartHub.ai’s Edge Asset Management platform aids in expansive infrastructure control by maintaining comprehensive device data, tracking device movements, streamlining warranty, support, and license management – facilitating hardware and software planning, and new device procurement.
- It automates basic cyber-hygiene processes such as automating user passwords rotation and certificates management process across edge components.
- Integrating alarm condition alerts into various communication channels like email, Slack, Teams, and incident ticketing workflows such as ServiceNOW ensures that the operations are automated, reducing business risks and improving resiliency at a lower cost.
This customer’s deliberate move towards unified Edge/IoT infrastructure management in collaboration with SmartHub.ai has brought about substantial transformation in physical security and overall infrastructure efficiency.
This customer, further expanded and deployed SmartHub CONVERGEᵀᴹ solution for AV Conference room management to address devices going down before the start of a critical meeting. It has helped prevent infrastructure inefficiencies, lost productivity and financial losses with uptime/ downtime monitoring & remote diagnostics & remediation. SmartHub DEFEND™ and SmartHub CONVERGEᵀᴹ has proved pivotal in elevating customer / member engagement and successfully attaining key business objectives.
