The Systems Integration Process: Avoiding Pitfalls and Improving Security

Choose Your Integrator Carefully
The bidding stage can be overwhelming for a lot of reasons. Systems integration is a complicated process that can be done in many different ways. As such, integrators take different approaches to projects and have different methods of working with their clients.

Greg Berg, the Regional Manager of G4S Technology, says his company talks to institution stakeholders after their initial assessment to better understand the needs of its clients.

“It’s a lengthy process but it builds value in understanding their security concerns as well as security and IT personnel, and we just like getting their impression of vulnerabilities so that we can go beyond just setting up a camera to watch a door,” Berg says.

Welton says Siemens helps clients determine alternative sources of funding for integration projects.

“At Southern Methodist University, we engineered a total campus solution, so to figure out financing, we helped them save on energy. They used those savings to complete the migration from analog video to IP video,” he says.

With so many companies competing for each institution’s business, it might seem like you can’t lose when selecting an integrator. Komola, however, warns of integrators promising too much and manipulating their bids. Campuses must be patient.

“You talk to a lot of salesman and they tell you that their system can do everything besides string a banjo and make a song, when in fact a lot of what they’re talking about is in the research and development stage,” he says. “So we had to have them set it up and run it to kick the tires, so to speak. We also wanted to see how other folks were using the same integration so that we could see how it functioned for them.”

Komola stresses the importance of holding off on committing to anything until you’re sure the system is the right fit. After all, he says, there’s a lot on the line when your institution is making such a large investment.

“You have to put them on the hook, bring them in and say, ‘Show me how it works. Make it work,'” Komola says. “Otherwise you’ll embarrass yourself because the administration has confidence in your ability to bring in the right product. A lot of times when you have a big system, it takes a lot of cash, and if you can’t come up with a product that matches that, you have a tough time coming back for more later. But we hadn’t fully committed so we had an advantage because we hadn’t signed off yet.”

Get the IT Department on Board
Integration is such a technical process that it’s no secret IT departments should play a major role in each stage. Compared to security personnel, IT people look at institutions differently, and that perspective can provide valuable insights as you make major decisions that will affect the entire campus. As the integration industry has evolved, the importance of consulting with the IT department has only grown.

“Every good system has foundations, and the basic building blocks are IT support,” says Welton. “These systems more and more are operating in a virtual environment.”

Every institution’s system has unique limitations and characteristics. No one knows those characteristics better than the IT department. Komola works with his IT people from the start as a way of verifying the promises of project bidders.

“We have a tremendous amount of support from our IT people, so they can stand up a box with a number of terabytes of data storage and we can tell [bidding integrators] to put their demo model in there and make it work. We want to see it function,” Komola says. “We’re going to see how fast it works, and we’re going to load our data in and see how it works with that.”

The IT department may also be aware of ways to save money. Steven DeArruda, a consultant for Business Protection Specialists Inc., says IT can sometimes reroute certain connections or open up space on an institution’s network.

“IT folks are very important to bring into the mix because they have infrastructure that a lot of times they are not using,” he says. “They may have dark hardware somewhere running that could provide more than sufficient space to run a management system on.”

IT staff can also find problems or raise concerns of their own, which are a lot easier to sort out before rather than after the new system is in place.

“Your integrators may come in and say, ‘We can do remote access to your server and with it we can help you with things.’ The integrator may even form their bid in a way that assumes they have remote access to that facility or server, but your IT department may not allow that,” DeArruda says. “We’ve had instances where [IT people] felt the mobile application the integrators were using wasn’t secure enough for their network and flat out said no.”