Intelligent CIO North America Issue 05 | Page 83

FINAL WORD we ' re seeing is that there ' s a trend , moving towards actually locking down , all the way down to the cabinet level and when you think about it it makes a lot of sense because not only does it help with any nefarious internal actors , but it also might help if an enterprise has equipment that ' s located outside of their core facilities in a colo or another location , a point of presence site , where they may not always know who ' s coming and going . The site might house multiple companies where there are lots of different people . It gives an extra layer of security where they might not always be able to be in control of it from the gate down to the cabinet-level . So , physical security is very important , not only for nefarious actors but also for any potential issues where a user or technician might be going into the wrong cabinet , might be fumbling around and unplug something by accident . It can help prevent a lot of unnecessary downtime .
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic , can I ask how important remote monitoring capabilities are ?
things like containment to better control the cooling or the exhausting of heat and consider how they ' re distributing power and how they ' re monitoring and managing their environments and ask what tools they need to be able to do that effectively . So it ' s interesting , we ' re kind of at a point where we ' re starting to see a shift away from maybe the older styles of monitoring and management and more towards a more sophisticated way of monitoring and collecting data in and around the white space to gain more insights .
Why is good physical security crucial for data centre operators ?
Physical security is really important . A traditional data centre will have a number of different layers of physical security from the gate outside the data centre , maybe it ' s a colo or wholly-owned data centre and usually there ' s some sort of perimeter security . And then there ' s usually two or three layers of inner security as well , you may have a gate or a mantrap at the building entry and then subsequent layers of doors with card access and biometrics to actually get into a room that has computers .
From there you ' ll typically have one or two approaches . You ' ll have the key method or in some cases you may not have any keys if it ' s a very secure location . But what
They are super important . We ' re seeing that a lot of our users no longer even have access to their data centres , it may be a model in some organisations where technicians only have access . So having the ability to go in and remotely monitor and remotely administer things is a crucial aspect and for our products in particular , the ability to get alerts and alarms and be able to react very quickly to potential issues is really a godsend for a lot of our users . It helps prevent that dreaded downtime that everyone ' s always looking to avoid .
We see headlines like the one about an AWS outage recently . Incidents like that in a lot of cases can be prevented by deploying things like environmental sensors or having Intelligent PDUs that have the ability to monitor things like circuit breaker trips or various power events that might happen even down to a cabinet or maybe even an outlet level . So there ' s a tremendous amount of benefit that you can get from remotely monitoring , because it allows you to take much faster action , and it gives you the flexibility to really deploy your on-site resources more effectively .
How are automation tools being used and how much of a role will they have going forward in data centre environments ?
This plays off the whole remote work development as we have fewer and fewer people that may be on-site at the data centre . Whether that ’ s caused by a pandemic or is just an organisation ' s goal to reduce the number of staff and to keep these environments a little bit leaner , automation is a critical part of this because it
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