Reliance High Tech provide maintenance and installation services to a leading British power generator which operates Europe’s biggest biomass fuelled power station and supplies around 8% of the nation’s electricity needs.
When we first engaged them they required support with an existing video management system which was outdated and they had multiple access control systems, as well as various technologies that worked in isolation but were deemed inefficient by the new management team. To add to this, their sites have a status as a member of critical national infrastructure. When we commenced the internal project planning for the security upgrade, their IT specialists focused on the ever-increasing cybersecurity threats, setting an exceptionally high standard for their cybersecurity requirement.
We reviewed four platforms and down selecting to two. Both were analysed by the cybersecurity team as part of a rigorous process, and initially they concluded that neither complied with their requirements. However, over the last 10 years, Reliance High Tech has invested in a team of highly skilled Professional IT Services team, who have developed extensive experience of working at the highest levels of security with many CNI customers and they were able to successfully work with the platform providers to make their system compliant and secure.
They now have a secure, comprehensive PSIM platform with specified security component systems, hardware and software that is a stable base for all its sites to be migrated to. The system now supports connectivity to 20 sites across the country utilising a wide variety of technologies and transmission methods. We integrate a number of access control and intercom systems with circa 150 access control points reporting back to the centralised solution and circa 200 cameras.
The application is deployed on the customers own infrastructure and environment and deployed under their chosen virtualisation technology. Reliance provided the specifications for all virtual servers and detailed designs for network topology, protocols bandwidth and advised on recommendations and best practice methods.
We have ensured full server resiliency provided at VMware level along with clustered SQL environment by deploying under high availability clusters and deployed VM’s for Genetec, Verint VMS, IndigoVision and icomply PSIM solutions.
As part of our implementation we have produced both a production and test environment to enable progressive testing and implementation of patching and upgrades of key components aligned with Drax’s IT policies and procedures.
The solutions fully integrate with the sites current Active Directory for additional security, however Drax are actively working on Azure and we are currently working with them on proving the integration with Azure AD. We heavily utilise Azure and Azure AD in our cloud based access control system we supply to multiple global customers to manage access control onboarding.
