One of G4S’s customers is a large multinational corporation with locations around the world. The customer specialises in internet connection and data centres and is an industry leader in the global colocation data centre space. With over 200 data centres operating in 27 countries across five continents, this company manages a massive amount of data in locations all over the globe.

With so many locations, the customer was facing challenges with the standardisation of security systems across its data centres. Different data centres within various countries were each using unique systems, which meant it’s headquartres found it difficult to ensure compliance and adhere to certain security standards. Any noncompliance could result in great risks and potential liabilities if customer data were to be compromised. In this case, it was specifically the customer data centres in Hong Kong where G4S would be contracted to step in and begin integrating its security systems.

THE GOALS

The customer’s primary objective was to standardise security using a single management platform. This would allow headquarters to instantly access information on all of its major systems. If any alarms were to occur, they could be immediately dealt with instead of operating on a delay, thus damages from the event triggering the alarms would be minimised. 

Interconnected with the first goal, the second objective would be to ensure compliance with security standards in the Hong Kong data centres. As the customer couldn’t shut down the data centres for any period of time, it was also important to implement the new security systems without affecting daily operations. G4S presented its implementation plan, and the customer agreed that G4S was the right partner to accomplish these objectives.

THE SOLUTION

G4S worked to systematically upgrade and maintain the customer’s network security systems with a failsafe to fall back to the previous system if necessary during the upgrade. Enabled by an integrated solution, when the systems detect a security downtime, our security guards can promptly react to the incident to ensure the customer’s daily operations not being affected. If at any point an issue arose, G4S was able to immediately roll back to the previous security system and restart the updates again.

The Electronic Security Systems (ESS) components to G4S’s security solution included AMAG access control and video management systems. The installation of the access control was a migration of the system door by door to avoid disruption to daily operations, as opposed to trying to implement the AMAG access control all at once and risk widespread issues. The key was to always have contingency plans in place.

THE RESULTS

As of early 2022, this project is still ongoing. While the final results can’t be analysed, the progress has been very positive. G4S has been able to meet each customer deadline because of its ability to deploy as many resources as necessary when time is a factor.

The goal of achieving standardised security solutions is being met with the agreed-upon solution that G4S and the customer had implemented. As these systems are installed, they are meeting compliance requirements and the customers headquarters are able to more efficiently access systems.

Initially, G4S was only engaged by the customer for the Manned Security Services (MSS) services. However, G4S was able to leverage its expertise in AMAG systems to also win the contract for the ESS needs. This means G4S is now supplying most of the MSS and ESS services to the customer’s Hong Kong data centres.