Kastle Systems Affirms its One-of-a-Kind Business Continuity Program for Security
Kastle’s Houston Operations Center Experiences Zero Downtime During Hurricane Ike
Houston, Texas, September 30, 2008:
Kastle Systems, the leading provider of outsourced security to commercial office buildings, announces its unique Fifteen Point approach to business continuity that has not only kept thousands of security systems online during true emergencies, including its 183 Houston-based buildings during Hurricane Ike, but also handles over 250,000 events per month, preventing disasters, enhancing security
and enabling buildings to be operationally efficient.
Although natural disasters like Ike get the most attention, they, in fact,
comprise only about 5% of damaging system failures.
The leading causes are not natural disasters, but are operation
and hardware errors, comprising 80% of downtime.
Examples include hardware and software failure, human error,
power outages and communications failures. Kastle’s Fifteen
Point approach comprehensively addresses all types of system
failures and disasters.
As the leading provider
of outsourced security, Kastle’s plan is a holistic approach.
It considers not only continuity but also prevention. It provides
extensive coverage to protect its systems, including its own
Operations Centers and its clients’ onsite security hardware
and software. In addition to this, it protects its clients’
systems through the use of sensor monitoring of its clients’
environments. This helps prevent the more common and costly
disasters caused by changes in the environment,
such as overheating in the IT room, equipment tamper or
even water levels rising.
A central element of Kastle’s approach includes the deployment of
four fully-staffed redundant Operations Centers in Houston,
Washington D.C., Philadelphia and Sydney, Australia.
This gives Kastle the ability to switch monitoring from one
center to the other in the event that it is required.
Each center is supplied with an uninterruptible power supply (UPS),
back up air conditioning, and two back-up generators,
all of which are also monitored for failure.
Kastle’s databases
are all redundant. Additionally, with its current technology,
Kastle employs a distributed processing software architecture so
if communications should go down between Kastle and a client,
the client’s system will continue to operate as usual during
the down time. Additionally, Kastle can provide two onsite
event processors, so if one should go down, the other will
take over
On the client side,
Kastle provides a process of notification of critical
environmental or system changes through the utilization of
sensor monitoring. Examples include notifications of burglar
alarms, equipment tamper, HVAC system indicators, power outages
and water detection.
“Kastle monitors
the HVAC systems in our data centers. If any of those systems go
down, we are notified (by Kastle). No HVAC means the room is going
to get hot, which means the servers are going to shut down.
Early warning is invaluable to us. If our data center crashes
because of heat, that would be a terrible thing. Kastle has
helped us on several occasions to prevent such a disaster
in our data centers.” said Sharon O’Meara,
Chief Administrative Officer of Dickstein Shapiro, LLP.
Kastle also offers an
emergency response system allowing clients to secure and lock
their buildings with the wave of a card. Clients can run
“roll call” reports to determine last known location of
employees in the event of a disaster
“Kastle brings a
comprehensive approach to business continuity. In times when
security is more important than ever, Kastle is committed not
only to keeping our clients’ systems operating properly when a
disaster has occurred, but even more importantly, in helping
them prevent disasters from ever occurring.
Even the smallest gap in the security process means simply that
you are not secure.” said Ramona Brady,
Vice President of Kastle Systems.
About Kastle Systems
Kastle
Systems has been leading the industry for more than 35
years with new technologies and advanced security
solutions. Kastle sets the standard for the design,
installation, operation, and management of building and
office security systems. Their products and services are
offered on the GSA Supply Schedule.
Kastle is the only company that operates and manages
security systems for its clients offsite,
around-the-clock. Currently, Kastle successfully
protects more than 1,800 properties with over 37,000
tenant spaces, for a total of 316 million square feet of
office space nationwide and internationally.
Kastle’s innovative outsourced security services
significantly reduce costs and improve the critically
important, 24/7 performance of security systems for
building owners, developers, and tenants.
Headquartered in Washington, D.C., Kastle Systems has
offices in Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New
York, Philadelphia, and Sydney, Australia. To learn more
about Kastle’s security solutions, visit
www.kastle.com. |