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Three Reasons Perimeter Protection Needs to be Included in Your Data Center Security Strategy Industry Voice by Genetec | Oct 21, 2021 When most people think about perimeter security, they think about what happens at the fence line. Yet Restricted Secured Area (RSA) Surveillance isn't just useful at the edges of your property. Forward-thinking security teams go a step beyond, extending the first layer of surveillance beyond the fence line to detect and evaluate potential threats before they ever reach the perimeter. Your "perimeter" includes any area that needs protection or is restricted from certain access holders — sometimes even including the airspace above a restricted zone. 1. Manage areas, targets, and threats If you have expensive assets, you need to protect them. But security also can't get in the way of running your business. Since you can't restrict all activity in and around sensitive areas without affecting operations, your security solution needs to be designed to meet your operational requirements first and foremost. Begin with a threat assessment. Think about the different ways you can protect sensitive zones, create workflows to manage data and automate threat detection — and guide staff to respond more efficiently and effectively. When it comes to keeping data centers secure, the best strategy is a layered approach. It's great if an alarm is triggered if someone should climb the fence, but there should be more layers of security that slow or stop unauthorized people from reaching the door of the building, and/or restricted zones or floors inside. Give more information to operators to shorten their response time, qualification, and response to a detected target Your first layer of security begins not at the fence line, but just beyond. By monitoring activity on the outside of your perimeter, operators can qualify moving targets and tag them to ensure an appropriate response. If it's a squirrel, the system can be set to ignore the target. If it is a person approaching the fence line, the target can be tagged as a potential threat, raising the alert level. Likewise, if perimeter security identifies people repeatedly gathering or moving through restricted areas near data centers, the RSA system can trigger the security operator to do a threat qualification and vulnerability assessment, pulling in relevant data from access control, lidar, or other systems as necessary, to get a better understanding of what is happening and why. With well-defined standard operating procedures, a unified security software solution can also suggest different solutions to help operators respond quickly and appropriately. Arm and disarm areas based on custom schedules When your RSA solution is unified with access control and HR databases, restricted zones can be armed or disarmed based on roles and schedules that make sense for your business. For example, if a service technician is authorized to work on server rack #5, the employee can gain access only to that rack. If required, the rest of the racks can remain protected. In that case, if the technician approaches or touches rack #4 or #6, the system can be designed to alert operators of a situation that may require closer monitoring. 2. Reduce nuisance alarms The biggest single problem with most intrusion detection systems is that they don't discriminate between a potential threat and a real problem. When there are dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of intrusion alerts in a day, responding takes time away from other important tasks. Staff may also become numb to the alerts over time, potentially slowing their response to an actual threat.

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