Guest: Dave Bermingham (LinkedIn)
Company: SIOS Technology (Twitter)

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Dave Bermingham, Director of Customer Success at SIOS Technology, to discuss the importance of high availability building maintenance and security systems.  

Key highlights of this video interview:

• Building maintenance systems deal with the upkeep and repair of the physical structure and its components while security systems focus on protecting the building and its occupants from unauthorized access theft or other threats. These two are different and separate from energy management, HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning) or fire protection systems, but they often interact with each other to ensure a safe and efficient environment.
• The availability and resilience of these systems are essential because they directly impact the safety, security, and overall functionality of a building. Ensuring that the systems are always operational and able to withstand disruptions is crucial to minimize downtime, reduce risk, and maintain the well-being of the building’s occupants.

How to balance security and accessibility:

• create protocols and processes that cater to both requirements, i.e., implement access control systems (e.g., card readers or biometric scanners that are user-friendly) but also maintain robust security measures.
• provide the appropriate training to the building occupants on how to use these systems effectively and responsibly.
• Make sure occupants understand the consequences of bypassing these systems. Make it a part of your policy.

Technologies that could significantly impact building maintenance and security systems:

• AI and machine learning for predictive maintenance.
• Internet of Things (IoT) devices for real-time monitoring and control.
• Ring cameras and advanced video analytics for improved surveillance and threat detection that goes hand in hand with machine learning and AI.

To address common misconceptions that these systems are overly complicated or too intrusive: 

• Communicate the importance of these systems.
• Highlight their benefits.
• Demonstrate the ease of use and adaptability to individual needs.

To ensure system availability and resiliency:

• Conduct regular system monitoring and maintenance.
• Implement redundancy measures. Whether you’re implementing some high availability failover clustering for some of the components, eliminate single points of failure as much as possible.
• Use high quality components. Any part that can fail is your weakest link.
• Conduct risk assessments and then make plans to address those risks.
• Have contingency plans to address potential failures or disruptions.

SIOS Technologies’ clustering software:

• provides high availability and disaster recovery solutions.
• ensures that critical applications and data remain accessible and protected, even during unplanned downtime or system failures.
• automatically detects those types of failures and does local recovery, if possible.
• has the ability to failover to the standby system to make sure that the system continues to run even in the event of failures.
• integrates with existing building maintenance security systems by working with industry standard platforms, e.g., Windows and Linux systems and the protocols and the common applications that are often part of the systems to ensure that they’re continuously available.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.