In this exclusive interview, Mike Margrain, Technical Director Asia Pacific and India, Middle East and Africa at Gallagher, shares his vision for the future of data center security, and the challenge to implement solutions that don’t just mitigate risk, but also deliver operational clarity, regulatory alignment and long-term resilience.
As data centers have increasingly become mission-critical infrastructure, their protection is more essential than ever. Gallagher Security strives to provide the right solutions to challenges facing data center operators and their growing demand for smarter, more unified security. From layered access control to hybrid cloud architectures and integrated environmental monitoring, Margrain offers expert insight into how modern security platforms excel at their core task while also navigating regulatory requirements and improving operational efficiency.
Q: What are some of the key security challenges facing data centers? How can these challenges be addressed by security solutions?
Margrain: Data centers operate in environments defined by high assurance requirements, strict regulatory obligations, and increasing customer scrutiny—particularly from tenants entrusting their most critical systems to third-party facilities. One of the foremost challenges is enforcing precise, role-based access across a site with varying sensitivity zones, from general plant areas to high-security data halls and individual customer cages. In contrast to traditional workplaces, a single unauthorized presence can have far-reaching implications, including regulatory breach, tenant loss, or operational disruption.
Ensuring that access is tightly controlled, audited, and enforced at every transition point—between floors, rooms, cages, or racks—requires more than basic access control. Facilities need dense and intelligent infrastructure that supports granular policy enforcement, real-time alerting, and integration with identity and visitor management systems. Modern unified security platforms help address this by consolidating control and monitoring across access, intrusion, video, and environmental systems, allowing for faster incident detection and response.
Legacy infrastructure poses another significant risk—often leading to system fragmentation, inconsistent policy enforcement, and increased administrative burden. Unified platforms designed to bridge or replace these legacy components reduce complexity while elevating the security posture.
A growing area of focus is sustainability. Data centers are under increasing pressure to reduce environmental impact as part of broader ESG commitments. Integrated security systems that can coordinate with building management platforms—for example, adjusting lighting or HVAC based on occupancy data—can support operational efficiency and contribute directly to sustainability goals.
In addressing these challenges, the most effective security solutions don’t just mitigate risk, they deliver operational clarity, regulatory alignment, and long-term resilience across the facility.
Q: What security solutions/systems are typically used at data centers?
Margrain: Data centers rely on a layered security architecture that begins at the perimeter and extends to individual racks. At the perimeter, protections typically include vehicle access control, crash-rated barriers, surveillance, and physical intrusion deterrence and detection such as electric fencing, taut wire, or vibration sensors. These measures provide both deterrence and early warning to prevent unauthorized access before it reaches the building.
Once inside, security becomes increasingly granular. Facilities enforce strict access control throughout the site—across floors, data halls, and secure plant areas—with multi-factor authentication using a combination of access cards and biometrics such as fingerprint or facial recognition. Interlocks are used at access points to highly sensitive zones to prevent tailgating and enforce single-person access.
Every door is treated as a checkpoint, and visitor movement is closely managed. Access to individual cages and racks may be electronically or physically controlled, with integration with key management systems where required. These access control systems are typically unified with intrusion detection, alarm monitoring, and video analytics, providing centralized oversight and rapid situational awareness.
This integrated approach ensures operators can enforce strict policies, manage complex access scenarios, and maintain full visibility across the entire facility, meeting both operational demands and regulatory expectations.
Q: Are these systems integrated on a unified platform? Are such unified platforms increasingly used at data centers, or are systems still being used in silos?
Margrain: There is a clear and accelerating shift toward unified security platforms in the data center industry. While siloed systems still exist in some facilities, they’re increasingly seen as incompatible with the scale, complexity, and assurance demands of modern data centers.
As facilities grow in both size and strategic importance, operators must manage rising volumes of personnel, credentials, and system-generated events, often across multiple tenants and zones. Unified platforms bring together access control, video surveillance, intrusion detection, and alarm workflows into a single architecture, enabling more efficient operations, tighter control, and faster, coordinated response to incidents.
By reducing duplication, simplifying system administration, and supporting automation, unified platforms help minimize risk while also lowering operational labor costs. For data centers managing high volumes of activity and complex access requirements, unification isn’t just a trend, it’s an operational imperative.
Q: Why are unified security platforms important in data center security? What benefits do they offer? What challenges can these platforms help solve?
Margrain: Unified platforms offer consistency, control, and operational efficiency. Security breaches can have catastrophic consequences, so the ability to link access events directly with live or recorded video, push out instructions to operators, and notify affected parties—all from the same interface—is a major advantage. A unified platform can empower organizations to treat a denied access attempt not as a passive log entry, but as a critical alarm. This enables detailed alarm workflows that combine real-time video, operator guidance, and direct communication with the individual involved. That level of integration is something siloed systems can’t match and speaks to the importance of unity in design.
Q: What are some of the key features that a unified security platform for data center applications should have?
Margrain: An ideal unified security platform for data center environments should deliver granular access control, strong credential and biometric authentication, and seamless integration with video surveillance, intrusion detection, and visitor management systems. Effective key management is also essential. Support for remote cryptographic key provisioning eliminates manual reader updates, streamlining operations and strengthening security in sensitive zones.
Crucially, the platform should also support integrating environmental monitoring such as temperature, humidity, smoke, water, and power events into the access control system. This enables real-time annunciation and alerting from a single interface, rather than relying on siloed systems. When physical and environmental events are unified under the same platform, operators gain faster situational awareness and can respond more decisively to threats or anomalies.
All logged events—whether access-related, environmental, or alarm-based—should be available for centralized aggregation into a SIEM system, supporting proactive security management and accelerated incident resolution. The platform must also meet any applicable regulatory compliance requirements, providing comprehensive audit trails and reducing complexity across all layers of the security architecture.
Q: How does a data center unified security platform work? Is it typically hosted on premises, in the cloud, or used in a hybrid approach?
Margrain: Most data centers adopt an on-premises or hybrid model for unified security platforms, ensuring local control and alignment with infrastructure management practices. In a hybrid architecture, the core platform remains on premises while selected services—such as mobile credential enrollment, visitor registration, and service request handling—are securely delivered via the cloud.
Modern platforms can be designed to leverage cloud services without exposing the core system to inbound traffic, maintaining strong security boundaries. This allows operators to benefit from the scalability, remote management, and innovation of cloud capabilities, while preserving full control over data and infrastructure. A unified platform that supports this hybrid approach provides the flexibility needed to meet evolving operational and compliance requirements without compromising security posture.
Q: What factors should be considered when choosing a unified security platform for data centers?
Margrain: Selecting a unified security platform for data centers requires careful consideration across operational, regulatory, and technical domains. Compliance is a foundational requirement. Support for standards such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI-DSS and other region-specific certifications is increasingly expected by tenants, auditors, and regulatory bodies.
Integration is equally critical. The platform should natively support interoperability with identity providers, visitor management systems, video surveillance platforms, alarm monitoring, and key cabinet management, enabling seamless data flow without duplicative configuration or administrative overhead. A unified interface for monitoring, alerting, and audit logging across these systems streamlines operations and strengthens incident response.
Access control capabilities must be flexible enough to handle complex scenarios typical in data center environments, such as contractors requiring temporary access to multiple tenant spaces, or layered access policies that differ between operational zones, data halls, and individual cages or racks. Support for mobile credentials, interlocks for sensitive areas, and granular policy enforcement at every layer - including floors, rooms, and equipment enclosures - is essential.
Scalability and reliability are also key. The platform should be capable of supporting multi-site deployments, hybrid architectures, and high-availability configurations without compromising performance. Vendors with a proven track record in high-security environments—such as government, critical infrastructure, or enterprise-grade colocation—can offer valuable assurance around product maturity, support quality, and long-term viability.
Ultimately, the right platform should empower data center operators to maintain strong physical security, enable operational efficiency, simplify compliance, and deliver confidence to tenants and stakeholders alike.
Q: Please introduce your unified security platform for data center applications. What are its main features, and what sets it apart?
The Gallagher Security platform is purpose-built for environments where security isn’t optional—it’s foundational. Designed to meet the specific demands of data center operations, it delivers fully unified control over access, video, intrusion, alarms, and visitor management within a single system architecture.
What truly sets us apart is our globally unique platform architecture, which natively integrates perimeter intrusion detection, access control, elevator control, building management, and video surveillance on the same intelligent controllers. This allows data centers to manage all critical systems in a cohesive, policy-driven manner, eliminating silos and enabling faster, more informed responses.
Our cyber-resilient design supports secure standards-based cryptographic key management and end-to-end encryption. We also offer deep integration with leading biometric solutions, and native support for hybrid architectures, ensuring operators can extend capabilities via the cloud without compromising security or requiring inbound exposure.
Certified to support the strictest global compliance standards, including ISO 27001 and SOC 2, our platform is trusted to protect some of the world’s most sensitive government and critical infrastructure sites. This makes it ideally suited for data centers, where tenant demands often require the facility to meet the same level of assurance as the systems they host.
In short, we don't just deliver features—we deliver operational clarity, regulatory compliance, and unified control at scale. For data center operators, that means security you can see, trust you can prove, and flexibility you can build on.
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