Convergint Ireland’s Data Centre Team Offers End-to-end Security Services

I started my career as an apprentice, then I worked my way up to an Engineer, Site Supervisor, Project Manager, and Program Manager. I originally joined Convergint through the acquisition of MTS Security in January 2019, which coincided with my move from operations to sales and account management. Since 2019, I’ve been focused on delivering results and being my customers’ best service provider. In that time, I’ve learned a lot about the challenges and pressures that the security industry face, in particular the data centre vertical. In response, Convergint has established a team focused on supporting our data centre clients as comprehensively and efficiently as possible. 

The Data Centre team at Convergint Ireland is made up of a number of sales and operations colleagues who are focused on supporting our data centre and cloud infrastructure customers. This focus allows our colleagues to have a greater understanding of the particular challenges and regulatory compliance requirements, which are often relevant to our data centre customers.

The way society is using and consuming data has grown exponentially in recent years. This reality, coupled with technology like IoT as part of the industry 4.0 movement, means that the demand for data and as a result data centres, is growing. Its this rapid growth that I believe is the biggest challenge when it comes to security for the data centre vertical, and it’s crucial that quality and resilience are not compromised by completing a project using an inexperienced team in a new location. For me, this is where partnering with Convergint, where we can use our scale and expertise to deliver at a consistently high level on a global scale, brings real value.

One opportunity for the data centre vertical will be to use 5G technology and hybrid cloud deployed security technology to help protect their edge sites. These are sites where it may not be practical to deploy a traditional solution we might see in a campus or colocation facility. As I mentioned previously, the rollout of 5G and IoT devices means that more of our data will need to be processed at the edge, securing these edge sites to the same level using the same platform as the hub sites will be a big requirement in the near future.

Some of our data centre customers are operating across multiple sites and regions but haven’t yet moved to a consolidated global security platform. There could be many reasons for this, but moving to a consolidated global platform presents an opportunity for them to make savings overall from a software licencing and staff training perspective. Having a consolidated platform, and deploying the same technology on a consistent basis also makes it easier for them to scale since they don’t need to worry about integrating new technologies found in different local markets.

While a lot of our Data Centre customers will have similar approaches in terms of their overall security postures, no two customers are exactly alike. Early on in our partnership, the team will take the time to understand the risk profile of a facility from the customer’s perspective which will help guide us further down the line. If they have templates and standards already, we as a team will get to know them pretty quickly. If they don’t, we are more than happy to help facilitate the creation of these documents, these kinds of organisational assets are hugely beneficial, especially if a customer wants to understand their security portfolio or has expansion planned for the future.

While I can’t discuss what I see in any individual customer sites, I can tell you that a number of our Data Centre customers are starting to look at ways they can leverage their security systems, which are often a big capital investment, to deliver more value to the organisation. Value beyond core security functions like locking doors and/or monitoring fence lines. The team is being asked more now about ancillary integrated systems like visitor management and additional integration capability with facility monitoring systems like BACnet and Modubs protocols.

Convergint Ireland’s data centre team are also noticing that more of our data centre customers are deploying security at a data rack or cabinet level. This involves us changing the traditional handles found on a data cabinet for new handles with integrated card readers… it’s actually more straightforward than it sounds and provides a great level of detail from an audit perspective.

At a project level, the Convergint Ireland data centre team would see security success as the on-time, of the best quality, and on-budget delivery of our customer’s projects. Stepping back from that and taking a more macro perspective on the partnership, if we can help our customers improve their security posture by advising them on industry best practices, or help them reduce their operational costs by deploying new and innovative technology, then I think the team has done a good job.

Convergint is an excellent choice for many reasons. The three most notable drivers for partnership with us are:

• When you choose to partner with Convergint Ireland, you’re partnering with an organisation that has service at its core and strives to be its customer’s best service provider.
• We are strategically located in a lot of the key data centre markets globally and have strong relationships with local service providers where we don’t yet have a local presence, to give you a consistent delivery on a global scale.
• We have strong relationships with all the major system manufacturers, and robust supply chain partners meaning we can often mitigate some of the equipment shortage risks that have become common in recent times.