Service level agreements (SLAs) are essential to the success of both colocation and hyperscale data centers. By helping organizations to choose a data center confidently, these agreements empower data centers to attract and retain customers. But when a data center fails to meet their SLAs, there can be significant legal, financial, and reputational consequences.

It’s standard for data centers’ SLAs to include uptime guarantees, and consistently meeting those guarantees requires data centers to address the security issues they face effectively. Connected physical security devices play a central role in providing that security, making managing these devices especially important. 

Uptime guarantees depend on reliable security

Data centers’ SLAs provide little room for error, often setting a minimum of 99.99% uptime – meaning that a data center that had a single hour per year of downtime (cumulatively) would be in violation of this type of SLA. And it’s common for SLAs to specify penalties for failures to meet uptime requirements. 

To meet strict uptime guarantees, data centers need robust security. A wide variety of incidents can physically prevent a data center from maintaining a required level of uptime, including criminal activity, fires, accidents, and natural disasters. 

In addition, SLAs often lay out minimum security requirements, including cybersecurity. This makes it even more important for data centers to follow best practices to uphold their SLAs.

Where do physical security devices fit in?

By protecting data centers from a wide range of threats, connected physical security devices can make a big difference in helping them comply with their SLAs’ uptime guarantees. But when those devices experience downtime, that can leave a data center exposed to physical dangers that risk causing the data center itself to experience downtime. 

Data centers must also be aware of the risk of hackers directly compromising their physical security devices, which doubles the risks. Connected devices are a significant threat vector and can be an entry point to sophisticated hackers aiming to take devices offline and physically expose the facility or cause a broader data breach by further infiltrating the data center’s IT infrastructure.

The bottom line? If a data center’s physical security devices have problems, the results could jeopardize that center’s compliance with its uptime guarantees – both because of its physical security devices’ downtime and because of their vulnerability to hackers. At the same time, these types of dangers can result in violations of other types of SLA requirements, such as those related to security. 

The importance of physical security device management

To mitigate these risks, it’s crucial to manage connected physical security devices properly. This is a complex and time-consuming endeavor – especially considering the growing numbers of devices, often composed of multiple models from multiple manufacturers. A fleet may even be distributed across multiple sites.

The central aspects of managing physical security devices include:

• Monitoring devices for both downtime and anomalies that could indicate cybersecurity problems.
• Rotating passwords regularly and ensuring that all passwords are sufficiently strong.
• Patching vulnerabilities by upgrading firmware when new compatible versions are released (which often include security patches).
• Managing certificates to help protect sensitive information through encryption.
• Hardening devices by ensuring that their configuration settings comply with best practices and organizational requirements.
• Replacing devices before they pass their end of service (at which point you can no longer count on new security patches to keep protecting them from cybersecurity vulnerabilities).

All of these steps can make a powerful difference in keeping data centers’ physical security devices running both reliably and securely, helping them to comply with both uptime and security requirements laid out in SLAs. 

The reality? Organizations often struggle with staying on top of these tasks when doing them manually – especially at scale. They also lack comprehensive visibility into both physical security devices and other assets on which they rely, such as video management systems and network switches. Organizations that adopt automation get real-time insights that help minimize downtime, leading to SLA success. 

To learn more, download “The Guide to Automating Physical Security Device Management.”