The DataBank Customer Portal: Real Time Visibility and Control of Physical Access to Your Colocation Environment

In this second article in an ongoing series, we continue to present the DataBank Customer Portal and how it provides real-time visibility and self-service control. This article highlights the portal’s capabilities for managing physical access. Stay tuned for additional articles, or  learn more about the DataBank Customer Portal now.  

The security of your colocation environment is one of the principal responsibilities in our partnership with you.  There’s no need to submit a service ticket and wait on a response — it all happens instantly.  Having said that, if you’d prefer we make changes to your or your users’ badges and Portal users for you, we’re happy to do so – simply open a ticket requesting a change and we’re always here to help. When building a portal to enable real-time visibility and access control, you spoke, and we listened.  With our latest update, we’ve now enabled over 57 data center locations with the features our customers requested most:

• Define which users have permissions to grant access
• Review my list of badge holders and what they may access
• Request a new badge for a user with predefined access rights and have it ready upon arrival
• Alter, grant, and revoke access to specific locations in real-time
• Disable and enable users at your convenience
• Create both permanent and temporary badges for contractors
• Review and download your logs and compliance reports in real-time to review successful and failed attempts access attempts

For an overview of these features, please review our how-to videos

Define which users have permissions to grant access

To manage your users and their roles, the Customer Portal provides three default roles: administrator, billing, and support. You also have the option to create custom roles.

• Administrators are the only people who can manage users (add, edit, delete profiles and roles) and they can authorize orders, including new services and changes to existing services. The Customer Portal makes it possible for administrators to limit what users can see by tagging them to a specific service, so that when users log in all they see is information specific to that service. Other helpful options include two-factor authentication, which can be applied to all users or specific users, such as those who travel frequently.

Administrators also control the password expiration cadence—ranging from never (which we strongly advise against) to every 30, 60, 90, or 180 days. The Customer Portal will allow you to adopt any password expiration cadence you require.

• • Physical Access Administrators can grant and remove permanent access in real time for your badge holders.
  • Temporary Access Administrators can grant temporary access in real time. Each of these require both a start date and end date.

• Users assigned to Billing roles can view billing data, make payments, and change the organization’s billing address.
• Support users can review services, pull reports regarding services, and create service tickets and view the status of incidents.
• Additionally, Custom roles can be created to specify exactly what information and processes a given user may engage in the Portal.

To change and apply roles to a user, head over to the Managed Users section of our Customer Portal.  Click the Pencil next to the user to edit the records, and click on the permissions tab.

Ensuring Proper Access to Your Environment

Your account users are the only people in your company who are authorized to communicate with DataBank and receive Customer Portal notifications about your colocation services, billing, and support. The profiles you create will dictate which notifications (i.e., invoices, patching, system maintenance, support tickets) they receive and which information DataBank will discuss. You can be as specific as you like to determine exactly what users in your company can see and what they can control.

Our preference is for users to submit service and support requests through the Customer Portal so the user is automatically authenticated and we can immediately respond.  However, if an authorized user on the account calls DataBank, we validate that person through our authentication process. We then look at which rights the user has, and our support team will explain what that person can discuss based on his or her role. If the user wants to talk about something outside of the user’s profile rights, we check with your organization’s administrator contact(s) for permission to maintain the security of your environment.

Review My List of Badge Holders to See What They Can Access

One of the most common questions we fields is to provide a list of badge access holders and a list of what they can access.  This information is now available to you 24×7 in the card holder access list.  Click the pencil to review which badge readers a user can access.

 Request a New Badge for a User with Pre-Defined Access Rights and Have It Available Upon The User’s Arrival

The Physical Access section of the Customer Portal integrates with badge readers at our data centers, applying changes in real time to ensure only employees and vendors you’ve authorized can access your infrastructure.  To activate Permanent or Temporary access for a user, click on the Active Access link in our Customer Portal, then complete the form,  A badge will be waiting for pickup at the selected location and will be provided after identity verification.  You will be able to grant access only to the locations to which you have access.

Need to change and deny access quickly?  Do so in real time or at a scheduled date via the Customer Portal.

Alter, Grant, and Revoke Access to Specific Locations in Real Time

Do you have multiple cages, suites, and locations?  Manage physical access permissions on one screen across all of your locations.   In addition, customers who have vendors visiting the data center periodically for system maintenance but don’t require permanent access can toggle vendor badges on and off. You control access at all times.

Review and Download Your logs and Compliance Reports in Real Time to See Successful and Failed Access Attempts

Another important feature is the ability to pull logs of who has visited your data centers and see exactly what each person accessed. Our customers appreciate the ability to export monthly log reports to demonstrate controlled access to regulatory assessors and auditors. The log reports also show the history of activating and deactivating badge access.

Proving Compliance and Security to Key Stakeholders

The list of users to which you grant physical and digital access — and the history logs showing when they access the physical environment and the Customer Portal — will play a vital role in your compliance efforts. Whether it’s for HIPAA, PCI DSS, FedRAMP, or another regulation, you can export reports of all user activities for assessors to validate.

This information is also helpful in demonstrating your deployed security measures to your financial partners, investors, company executives, and board of directors. In today’s cybersecurity-conscious world, all these stakeholders are keenly interested in the physical and digital control you have over your colocation environment, and the DataBank Customer Portal can be a key tool in meeting their requirements.

Ultimately, the DataBank Customer Portal is yours, not ours. Its features are driven by our customers’ feedback, and updates meeting those requirements are rolled out as quickly as possibly by our in-house development team. We’re committed to ensuring the Customer Portal meets your needs and provides the best possible experience, facilitating user access based on your requirements.

To learn more, download the DataBank Customer Portal Overview today. If you would like to be notified when we publish new blogs about the Customer Portal, sign up.