According to Boon Edam in a new blog, “loss” in a data centre environment typically means breaches, outages, or downtime. But some of the most significant losses caused by physical security weaknesses don’t show up in those reports at all. This is an excerpt with a link to the full piece, below.
Instead, they creep up slowly through little deviations from defined access control procedures that don’t cause incidents on their own, but steadily increase labor costs, create compliance exposure, and reduce operational efficiency over time.
Entrances are operational systems with a direct impact on how smoothly and reliably your data center runs day-to-day.
Entrances are often treated as fixed controls…Not dynamic risk points
Power systems are redundant. Cooling is monitored. Networks are load-tested, patched, and hardened against evolving threats.
Entrances rarely receive the same treatment. Too often, they’re designed, deployed, and then forgotten, typically considered “good enough” once badge readers function and access appears restricted.
Eventually, this can lead to a disconnect between how entrances were designed to perform and how they actually operate in practice. As staffing levels become stretched, people start optimizing for speed. Nothing fails. But the process no longer works as designed.
Operational efficiency starts to slip, slowly at first
Compromised entrance security often begins with a loss of operational efficiency.
When your access controls can’t consistently enforce one-person-per-credential entry, that responsibility falls back to your guards and staff. Someone has to watch entrances more closely, guide people where they need to go, and manually approve access exceptions, like when:
- Guards are occupied handling routine access instead of monitoring cameras
- Employees stop to resolve credential issues or receive manual access
- Contractors wait for escorts or someone to resolve confusion
- Entry lines clog during shift changes or peak activity periods
Employees and guards become traffic cops rather than risk assessors.
Guard coverage turns into a hidden expense
Entrances that require intensive human oversight are inherently unpredictable. When entrance reliability starts to become erratic, it’s common to compensate by assigning additional guard coverage.
Examples include assigning extra guards during peak traffic, adding stop-gap coverage while entrance systems are down or in maintenance mode, approving overtime to handle contractor influxes, or assigning temporary staff during audits or high-risk activity.
Until one day, your labor bill has significantly increased due to entrance control limitations and not because of any actual incident.
Your entrance impacts uptime more than you might think
What about secondary consequences when access control isn’t always enforced at entrances? For example, technicians are delayed when they cannot access the building right away to complete preventative maintenance, incident response takes longer as employees wait in line at the front door, employees feel compelled to circumvent controls just to maintain a predictable workflow, or door alarms, integrations, and hardware isn’t working when needed most.
If delays at the entrance begin to affect maintenance response, incident resolution, or access to critical equipment, your entrances are now influencing uptime reliability.
Read the full piece, here
For more Boon Edam news, click here
