Scalability and Load Balancing in a Security Environment

Global enterprises and large, multi-site hospitals, universities, or government agencies are increasingly facing a common challenge—how to bring all of their disparate buildings into an easy to manage enterprise security system. Most multi-site organizations have a variety of sites, ranging in size from small branch offices to large multi-building campuses. In designing their Enterprise security solution, security directors and IT managers focus on the following three priorities:

1. Maintain a single database of all personnel that only needs to be updated once, across all sites
2. Provide both central management and reporting, AND local site control
3. Protect the system and facilities against network failures
   
   

Enterprises with different access control software solutions at each site have success with the third priority, but fail the first two. The “Enterprise” features of most traditional access control software providers focus on addressing the first priority (common personnel database), but generally fail priorities two and three.

Designing a true Enterprise security system that is both easy to use and delivers all three priorities requires access control software that can effectively manage the volumes of data produced by large Enterprises via Distributed Network Architecture. This white paper defines the key elements and benefits of Distributed Network Architecture and describes how Software House’s C•CURE 9000 Enterprise, available with version 2.0, addresses the priorities described above.