What makes Octopus special in the market of visitor management compared to any other solution today, is that our visitor management system is part of a larger holistic platform to secure an organization both within and without growth on physical and cybersecurity,” says Danny Nachmully, VP of International Sales in Octopus. In his interview with CIO Applications, Danny tells us how Octopus’ visitor management system is unique from its contemporaries and how it goes above and beyond to serve its clients’ visitor management and security needs.
WHAT ARE THE CHALLENGES THAT YOUR CLIENTS FACE FROM FREQUENT VISITORS? HOW CAN OCTOPUS HELP THEM EFFECTIVELY MITIGATE THESE CHALLENGES?
Visitor management in a work process, provides the ability to effectively control, process, register, and validate people coming into an organization with due diligence. You need to have a process that somehow, doesn’t give a feeling that people are being restricted, and on the other hand, offers the ability to monitor people coming into the premises. So, the challenge here is to balance it effectively. Also, large organizations deal with a lot of people coming in, so you need to do a level of risk monitoring, mitigation, and protection without harming business operations. So that’s another challenge. Octopus fits under the criteria of a high-end system fit for a large multi-sited organization, in a high-risk environment. Our system can be deployed in a cloud-hosted solution and meets all kinds of work requirements. It can run on a tablet, computer, laptop, or a mobile device. You can register, validate, and invite visitors from any platform it can run on-cloud and on-premise. For companies with multiple sites, our system aggregates all their data under one data pool and allows to apply it in a multi-tenancy architecture as a de-centralized deployment. We integrate with third-party systems like facial recognition, biometric systems and license plate recognition (LPR) to make a fluid and flexible integrated system according to what the organization may need.
“We want to ensure our customers that we not only monitor visitors but also your physical, cyber and intellectual aspects”
HOW SAFE WOULD YOU SAY THE INFORMATION THAT THE CLIENTS ENTRUSTED TO OCTOPUS IS? IS THERE ANY PARTICULAR SECURITY MEASURE THAT YOU DEPLOY?
In terms of security, visitor management is a very sensitive system. We deal with privacy and manage a lot of information related to people’s identity and personal information. We have to thus make sure that our system is secure from breach or any kind of compromise. Octopus is a visitor management system with nine ISO certifications, including ISO 9001 for quality assurance, ISO 90003 for quality assurance in software development, ISO 20000-1 for IT management services, and information security. We have ISO 20000-9, which is IT services for cloud and ISO 27001, ISO 27017, and ISO 27018 for information security on the cloud. We have ISO 27799 for health informatics and, finally, AS9100D for aerospace and defense. We have GDPR certification, which is essential for visitor management systems. We have been tested, validated, authorized, and have gone through harsh data privacy, penetration tests, and evaluations to make sure our system is void of leak and backend problems. Our data is encrypted both in rest and in transit. I don’t think any other company has so many certificates and compliance as we do.
IS THERE A CASE STUDY YOU WOULD LIKE TO SHARE WITH US FOR OUR READERS TO UNDERSTAND OCTOPUS’S SOLUTION IN A WORKING MODEL?
We have a visitor management system installed in 21 of Coca-Cola’s facilities. The system is running under the cloud with a unified data pool. So all the permissions we apply to the master system are applied to all sites via a centralized system. You control which site the vendors and distributors are allowed to access and which they are not allowed. Every time someone comes into a facility, you receive all his previous history. In Coca-Cola, one of the primary purposes of the visitor management system is to manage temporary employees. They can add up thousands of employees at a time. Octopus not only manages visitor and vendor registration and permission but also receives all their data from HR companies. The app captures not only their entry and exit but also their benching time, which it sends to the internal Coca Cola HR systems to calculate their salaries. Another added value provided to Coca-Cola is that supplier trucks are registered when they come in and their logistical information is captured. The data is used to calculate how many times a truck visited a site and route time between distribution sites, thereby calculating its efficiency. So that is the Coca-Cola case study where the visitor management system captures temporary employee timestamps and calculates their salary and efficiency of vendor trucks. This is pretty cool for Coca-Cola’s operations and also saves them a lot of money every month.
WHAT DOES THE FUTURE LOOK LIKE FOR OCTOPUS? HOW IS IT PLANNING TO GO BEYOND ITS CURRENT BOUNDARIES?
We are taking our visitor management system and expanding the platform to support even more crucial integrations with elements dealing with insider threats, cyber protection, and monitoring of physical assets, etc. We are trying to promote these solutions in the market and bring out the scope and value that the system can bring to customers. We wish to create awareness of the importance of a comprehensive, holistic visitor management system that is integrated with merging physical and cyber assets in one platform. A big, international company that has hundreds of buildings and holds SOCs of big-name companies understands very well that protecting their intellectual property is crucial to safeguard customer trust. Visitor management today is more understood in the market as one of the aspects of cyber and information protection. We want to ensure our customer’s that we monitor not only visitors but also your physical, cyber, and intellectual property aspects. We bring a one-stop-shop for visitor management and information security. That’s what we are trying to further push this more holistic visitor management platform and make the market better aware and understand its benefits.
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