Information technology includes important physical security controls. In this video, you’ll learn about barricades, access control vestibules, badge readers, video surveillance, and more.
If you were to look outside the entry place for a building, you may see these steel or concrete barriers. These are barricades or bollards that are designed to prevent access, especially access, by other vehicles through that particular area. This is also a good way to channel people through a specific point, so you can have people still walk through those barriers, but you’ve effectively now prevented any larger vehicle from getting through that particular area. This means we can dedicate certain areas to only be for pedestrians, and not have to worry about any other vehicle being in the area, which of course, is much safer.
And you may find different types of bollards or barricades depending on the environment that you’re working with. In some environments, you might have these very large, concrete round barriers that are installed, or you may find there is water around a building so that you have a canal or a moat to create a natural barrier.
If you’ve ever visited a data center, you may find that you’re walking into a small locked room that is first asking you for your identification and your justification for entering the building. This intermediate area between the outside world and the inside part of the data center is referred to as an access control vestibule, and there are different types of vestibules depending on the environment you’re working with.
For example, it may be that all of the doors of this access control vestibule are unlocked, but when you open one of those doors, all of the other doors lock themselves to prevent any access through the system. This means that only one person or one group of people can be moved through that vestibule at any particular time.
Other security controls might have all of the doors normally locked, and when you unlock one of the doors, perhaps with an access card, all of the other doors remain locked. You’re not able to unlock those until this door closes. And of course, there may just be two doors in this particular area, one to come in one side of the room and another door to exit the other side of the room. And when one door is open, the other one remains locked.
The idea behind these vestibules is to know exactly who is going in and out of a protected area. And usually there is some type of receptionist or security guard who’s checking the IDs and access badges for everyone moving through that area.
Here’s a view from outside one of these access control vestibules. You can see, there is an access card reader on the outside that gets you access to the inside of this room. You can then check in with the reception area, provide some identification, and they’ll unlock the door to allow you access to the rest of the facility.
These days, we don’t tend to use physical keys to gain access to a room. Instead, the process is all electronic, commonly using our access card to be able to swipe or gain access using one of these access card readers. Although you may still run into the older style magnetic reader, most of the readers these days are RFID or NFC. That way, you’re able to integrate it into the badge and simply move it close to the reader to be able to activate.
These badge readers often provide access to locked areas, but you can also use these to clock in or clock out. And sometimes they’re also integrated into the rounds that are done by your security team. If you were to carefully cut your access card in half to see what was inside, you’d probably see something like this. We have a key next to show you what size this happens to be. And you can see, if you look very closely, there is an RFID chip right in the middle, and it is connected to an antenna that wraps around the inside of the card.
Video monitoring has become very popular and very economical in recent years, and many organizations will have some type of video monitoring or CCTV, which stands for closed circuit television. This allows you to see what’s happening in many areas of your building or outside of your building, without having someone physically located in that area.
And our modern cameras have become very intelligent. They can identify different types of vehicles. They can read license tags and be able to provide you with feedback based on what they are seeing. An organization may have many of these cameras deployed. They’re all networked together. And all of that video signal comes back to one central recording station.
Your cameras can use radio reflection or infrared, especially at night, to be able to see if anyone may be in the area. And if it does detect motion, it can identify an alarm that on your console. This allows one person to watch cameras that may be located across the entire organization, and be able to monitor all of them from one place.
Getting an alarm or an alert from these systems can be done in a number of different ways. You could be using a circuit-based alert system that will identify when either a door is opened or a door would be closed. This would then send a signal back saying that there was some type of activity with that particular door. Or you may have this located on a window or a fence so any type of change or movement with anything in that environment would send an alert back to the security team.
We might also include sensors for motion detection. That way if there’s any type of movement, even if we’re not watching, the screen we’ll receive a notification that something was moving in that particular area. And in high security environments, there may be a duress button, perhaps a button underneath your desk, and if someone feels that this is an unsafe situation, they can push that button to cause the alarm to fire.
There are many different ways to lock and secure a door, and then provide access through that locked door. One of the most common ways is using a conventional lock and key. This is the way that most of us will protect our homes, and it’s something that requires a physical key to be able to open that lock. This works in conjunction with things like a deadbolt that provide additional security for that physical lock.
We might also use an electronic lock, like the one you see here, where you have to input a very specific personal identification number to gain access through that particular door. And as we’ve already seen, there are token based door locks that will use the RFID chip inside of your badge to allow you access through a door. And in some high security environments, you might be using biometrics, so it might be performing a fingerprint check or a handprint, or it’s even scanning the retina of your eye itself to prove that you are really the person who needs access.
And it’s not unusual to have multiple factors of authentication, especially for highly secure environments. So for instance, you might scan your badge, you might then put in a personal identification number, and then use a fingerprint to confirm your identity.
Even in very secure data centers, it might be a good idea to use locks on your cabinets to only allow access to authorized personnel. In large organizations, there might be multiple groups that are accessing all of these systems inside of a data center, and you want to be sure that you’re locking down those areas for those particular groups.
To provide this level of security, we’ll often put all of our racks together, side by side, so you can’t access anything inside the racks from those side panels. We’ll then add doors on the front and the back with locks, so that we can prevent access to the equipment that’s inside. But of course, we still need to cool all of that equipment. So it’s very common to have holes on the bottom and the top so that we can still have cool airflow through the system.
And once you have everything installed, it looks like this. You have all of these racks that are now put side by side. Some of these doors are glass, others are perforated so that it will allow airflow through the system while still maintaining security. If you need access to the equipment that’s inside, you’re going to need the key so that you can unlock these doors to gain access.
Many organizations will have a person who’s responsible for the security of an area. That person is often a security guard who’s at the reception area of a building. They might also be patrolling around the building as well. This is a person who can receive your identification, evaluate the identification, and then either allow you access to the building or deny you access.
It’s very common for organizations to require every employee to wear an ID badge. This will have a picture and their name, and it’s usually held on a lanyard that’s around their neck. As a visitor, you may also be given one of these badges. In some environments, they’ll even take your picture and give you a temporary version, but you need to make sure that you’re wearing that badge everywhere you go in the building.
And I visited some facilities where you need to pre-register with the organization to gain access. So when you arrive at the building, the security guard will check an access list that has a physical list of names of people who are allowed into the building during that day. If your name is on the list, then it speeds the process through and you can gain access to the facility.
This also provides an audit trail. You’re simply not allowing someone to walk into the building and walk out again. There is a time stamp and a date of who visited the building, where they went, and when they exited the building.
Fences not only make good neighbors, they also make good security for your building. Most organizations will have some type of perimeter around the building that prevents access through particular areas. These might be fences that are transparent, that you can see through, or they may be opaque and very difficult to see what’s on the other side. The goal is to prevent anyone from gaining access through that particular area. So most of these fences are usually a heavy metal and are resistant to any type of breaking.
And as you can tell, these fences are more than just a few feet off the ground. They’re high enough to make it difficult for somebody to gain access over the fence as well. In extreme cases, you may also see razor wire at the top to help prevent anyone from gaining access over the fence.