The Company:
Beit HaNassi – “Residence of the President” is the official residence of the President of Israel. It is located in Jerusalem, Israel.
The Challenge:The Israeli Presidential House’s challenge was the seemingly impossible quest to manage everything related to the health of their IT rooms from one central platform. Not only to monitor the physical devices such as servers, switches, routers, etc., but also to install sensors such as smoke detectors, light detectors, glass-break detectors, and flood detectors and to be able to monitor these closely & cohesively. This was an important step in enabling their building management & IT teams to take necessary action based on the specific issues occurring in the IT rooms at any given time.
Since the Israeli Presidential Office is a governmental entity and due to security concerns, they needed wired hardware, rather than wireless. It took some convincing to get them to try a platform that is cloud-based in Azure. Eventually, they understood the security aspects of using a cloud platform and brought the right partner ecosystem into the project.
All security tests and checks were passed successfully, proving that Azure is a safe platform to install IoT solutions. Additionally, this project opened up doors for other governmental offices, now that they have the approval to use this IoT platform. Other platforms that they evaluated before making their selection were standalone application providers, (IT, operations, etc.) which would have required significantly more overhead.
The Process: The Israeli Presidential House began working with the largest system integrator in Israel (Bynet), who provided the Axonize IoT platform, hardware from Backsoft, and installation and maintenance services. The combination of an IoT platform and hardware enabled the Israeli Presidential House to manage all their operational activities and to receive insights from several server room resources all from one central place.
The building management and IT Teams receive notifications via SMS or E-mail whenever there is an alert in the IT rooms that they need to act upon. The platform was also integrated with the Microsoft SCOM network management software enabling them to receive information about the network devices’ health.
The deployment and time-to-complete the project spanned only a couple days, which allowed them to benefit from comprehensive monitoring very quickly.
Current status of deployment:Their project has been in production for months, with 102 physical devices being monitored. The next phase of the project will be to connect the surveillance systems and IP-phones on this same platform.
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