“A managed service provider is more than just somebody who’s designing and installing a system,” Rob Jackson, president, Integrated Precision Systems, said. “It’s truly partnering with the client to maintain it and we are an almost internal part of the company that’s maintaining a vital asset or a vital system.”

Jackson, an MIT engineer who worked in the aerospace industry and for Amazon prior to acquiring IPS in 2017, set his vision to transform the physical security systems integrator into an IoT-managed service provider. Based in Cleveland, IPS helps clients in 27 states across the United States and 17 countries navigate risks, regulations and security budgets as new challenges arise. As legacy technologies become obsolete, IPS recommends and supports new systems. IPS’s team of IT professionals lives out its mission to make safe what matters most to their clients.

IPS uses PRTG, an agentless network monitoring software, from Germany-based Paessler AG. PRTG keeps clients in highly regulated industries in compliance and protected by ensuring uptime of servers, cameras, power supplies, card readers, radiation detection panels and much more. PRTG can also manage device lifecycle planning to reduce frequency of emergency device replacements due to failures, monitor server health and storage capacity to ensure video retention, reduce frequency of in-person service calls and accelerate issue resolution through remote monitoring.

“We would be told, ‘I’m looking for an incident on my video system and the cameras weren’t working,’ or ‘The hard drive was down.’ ‘Hey, our doors aren’t working.’ ‘What’s happening?’ ‘We’re not getting communication to this intercom system,’” Jackson said. “All of those instances are the client letting us know that something was not working correctly. And the thought was we should be telling them that we’ve fixed the problem…. A lot of applications in the security industry have the ability to send email alerts, and then you get bogged down with needing to develop something that’s classifying what is happening in the email and then deciding what’s going on.”

A vital part of any organization’s security status is the consistent uptime of its network and connected devices. Failures can cause massive security issues such as losing required compliance certifications, racking up fines and shutting down operations, which leads to loss of valuable revenue and assets. A year after acquiring IPS, Jackson continued to receive complaints from both clients and his employees about video surveillance files being lost, unavailable or not captured at all due to servers and devices falling offline and switches failing to transmit data.

“I was just detecting something that sends a notice,” Jackson said. “So within the software, we’re sending emails. The second way was just through phone calls. Unfortunately, it’s too late at that point. The video wasn’t there.”

Jackson knew IPS’s business model had to change and set a goal to build a service that would monitor the health of 20,000 client end points by 2024. In researching software solutions to accomplish that objective, Jackson had a couple critical requirements.

Jackson selected and implemented Paessler’s PRTG cloud-based XL1 license to transform IPS from a physical security integrator into an IoT-managed service provider. This move positioned the company to become a critical partner to its clients and to generate a steady, increasing stream of recurring revenue.

“The security industry, the systems integrator industry, is not mature in the IT space,” Jackson said. “That’s my opinion. [With a] preference for analog versus over IP, it’s hard to transition. Looking at the managed service space, you can get a wealth of information about computer systems in an automated way.

“One challenge they’re not thinking about is the low-cost endpoint,” Jackson continued. “They think about the server and the network, critical network infrastructure and the main components, and they don’t think about pricing something for an IoT device.”

Serving clients in highly regulated industries means that there is no tolerance for downtime. One client, whose liability risk was extremely high, inadvertently changed the recording settings on a batch of cameras. This one user error put excessive load on the server and spiked the CPU usage, resulting in packets of lost video needed for both evidence and staff protection. Cameras were streaming directly to computers, but not being saved on the server, which meant that no one onsite realized that critical video footage was being lost. PRTG quickly detected the issue and alerted the IPS team.

“We got those alerts,” Jackson said. “We’ve built a ticketing system off of PRTG that triages those. CPU load issues are a level three event. It means that everything that’s connected to that CPU is struggling. We immediately took action and started diagnosing and understanding why this is happening and fixing it.

“In the old scenario, that would have taken weeks of users saying this thing’s not working very well, and it keeps bubbling up until they finally say, ‘We’ve got to call somebody to get them out here to fix it,’” Jackson said. “This was within a day, we started getting these notices, ‘Hey, something is not performing as it should. It’s unusual. It’s too high.’ Let’s take some action. To reduce the response time, it’s a 10th of the response time of what normally would happen.”

Prior to implementing PRTG, IPS admins would visually check a client’s 300-camera system to ensure it was working properly every morning. Now, PRTG does this automatically, which has allowed IPS to scale up to more than 1,500 cameras and increase its revenue. By eliminating the manual process technicians previously used, techs have time to focus on more pressing issues.”

Paessler’s PRTG has also a relationship with AXIS. “There’s a development partnership where you can get AXIS camera information without logging into the camera; You can get the AXIS camera information passed to a sensor in PRTG,” Jackson says.

“The commitment of Paessler to support and report on IoT devices in the physical security space was a real distinctive attribute,” Jackson continued. “I was pleased when we started seeing that we’re an AXIS Gold partner as our preferred camera system and to see that development partnership was great.”

With the implementation of Paessler’s PRTG, IPS’s business tripled in three years and the company surpassed its goal to monitor 20,000 endpoints two years earlier than planned. — By Christopher Crumley, SDM Staff Editor //