Follow the Leader

Jun 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Kate Henry

People today striving for organizational nirvana most often turn to technology, inputting life's details into online commerce and banking, PDAs and the like in hopes of yielding a seamless system of checks, balances and task reporting.

The technology innovator whose products enable that connectivity is San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco Systems Inc. Widely hailed as the global leader in Internet networking solutions, its products and services can be regarded as comprising the Internet, and millions of people therefore depend on Cisco every day to make their businesses and lives run smoothly.

No surprise then that when Cisco sought to enhance its physical security operations in 1999, the solution was a sophisticated enterprise-based security network that was more than a year in the making, linking functions such as access control, badging, alarm monitoring and surveillance worldwide.

Bill Jacobs, senior manager of security, technology and systems for Cisco, was integral to that successful overhaul and, today, continues to have global oversight of the company's physical security systems and standards as well as integrator partnerships.

Jacobs' physical security oversight is broad to say the least, including 48,000 users on a worldwide access control system, 6,300 readers and 2,600 cameras in 295 locations taking up 17 million square feet in the Americas, Japan, Greater Asia, India and Australia, and Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Yet Jacobs' department is just a part of what safeguards Cisco's people and physical and intellectual property. Cooperation with the company's information security department and safety and security department — which are based at the 44-building San Jose headquarters — is essential, he says, especially in terms of systems management and troubleshooting.

According to Jacobs, Cisco has continued to research and study new security technologies in the five years since the overhaul, retaining certain system components, protecting the capital investment in others — enabling analog cameras to yield digital images, for example — and, most recently, troubleshooting a considerable digital video recording challenge with the help of IT.

IT and security synergy

“When we looked at the changeover from analog to digital recording five years ago,” Jacobs recalls, “the ROI looked to be about $1.1 million a year owing to reduction of monitoring and maintenance costs. That seemed clearly a benefit, and it seemed clear to move forward, but we did not realize that managing digital video recorders in the quantity Cisco does — that is, more than 300 of them worldwide — was a monumental management task.”

Jacobs says the challenge Cisco faced with its DVRs was that there was no enterprise network that could manage them all at once. “They're mechanical pieces of equipment that needed to be managed one box at a time,” he points out, and that was simply too labor-intensive in terms of troubleshooting and maintenance.

Working in collaboration with Cisco's IT department, Jacobs and his team looked for a more sustainable mode of operation for the recorders. The solution, he says, was to ask a manufacturer to unbundle their operating software so that Cisco could run it on Cisco-supported servers. Cisco turned to Lenel Systems International Inc., Rochester, N.Y., (which also provides the worldwide access control systems to Cisco) to facilitate the video solution.

“The new word on the street is really ‘NVR’ [networked video recorders] rather than DVRs,” Jacobs says. “We came up with the idea and Lenel gave us the ability to build it.”

Currently, Lenel Systems provides both Cisco's worldwide access control system and video recording technology; HID Corp. provides proximity cards and readers, and Jacobs notes that Cisco is researching smart card and biometric solutions; analog cameras are provided mainly by Pelco with encoders that convert images to digital provided by Axis. Integrator partners include Stanley Security/Best Access in the Americas, Siemens in the Asia Pacific region, Tasc Digital in Europe, the Middle East and Africa and, now, according to Jacobs, IBM Global Services Division which provides the servers that support the networked video.

Change is good

“There has been a lot written about the convergence of security and IT,” Jacobs says, “but Cisco is an excellent example of how these partnerships are actually formed and can work. Members of the traditional physical security team are not necessarily specialists in IP and/or network security, so through collaborating with our IT department, we have become partners in a far less-siloed model,” he explains.

And far from stepping on one another's toes, this cooperation has enhanced each department's ability to focus on its core competency and thereby value to the company — for IT, that's connectivity and troubleshooting of the same, and for physical security, that's management of the systems that protect lives and property and of new technologies and integration providers, Jacobs says.

“From a hardware perspective,” he explains, “the systems have literally become servers, so having everything connected on the enterprise network means we can depend on IT for service and support, and our departmental expenses have been reduced. Hardware and virus protection upgrades, for example, are just automatically done now — I don't have to worry about my team being called out to perform patches and fixes to the system if a virus attacks, and that helps me sleep a little better at night.”

There are additional advantages to the new configuration. Because the access and video are now essentially a perfectly merged system, playing in a merged software environment, additional storage devices are available. And further, Jacobs describes the new configuration as a clustered environment which, simply put, functions as a disaster recovery model in which one location can automatically back up another's access control and video recording functions.

In terms of monitoring, cameras on the system worldwide can now be accessed from a PC or even wirelessly on a PDA. This capability has greatly enhanced alarm monitoring and dispatch capabilities and has countless potential applications as well, notes Jacobs, even extending to facility management such as checking on the effectiveness of janitorial services, to verifying the throughput of users in off-hours to ensure building controls are being used efficiently.

Cisco is currently finalizing the worldwide conversion from DVRs to NVRs and its new configuration is meeting existing needs while being well-positioned for the future.

“The enterprise topology for access and digital video systems is enabling us to bring the cost of ownership down,” says Jacobs. “We've reduced our operating expenses such as database administration and guard services, and we have economized on dispatch and response.”

FOR THE RECORD

About the companies

For information, circle the Reader Service number (listed below) or visit securitysolutions.com

Axis Communications	5
HID Corp.	6
IBM	7
Lenel Systems Internatiobnal	8
Pelco	9
Siemens	10
Stanley Security/Best Access	11
Tasc Digital	12

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© 2008 Penton Media Inc.

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