Australasian tech firm TZ Limited (TZ) has won a purchase order for its smart locking Infrastructure Protection (IXP) product from a ‘major’ European banking and financial services corporation for the Singapore market, although the exact location of the deployment has not been disclosed.

Among other products, TZ makes a ‘sophisticated’ electronic locking solution that enterprises and data centers can deploy to secure and protect their physical IT assets. The solution is being marketed in the region by Singapore-based Appsilan, which is also expecting a number of significant projects to come to fruition in Indonesia and Hong Kong.

TZ’s executive chairman Mark Bouris said the win is strategically significant for its IXP business. Bouris pointed to revised guidelines released by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) for organizations in the tightly-regulated financial services industry in the country.

“Together with the new guidelines, MAS has also issued a notice which defines a set of legal requirements relating to technology risk management such as high levels of reliability, availability and recoverability of critical IT systems and the ability for Financial Institutions to implement IT controls to protect customer information from unauthorized access or disclosure,” Bouris said.

Bouris was referring to guidelines from MAS that stipulates the need for banking institutions to maintain a computerized audit trail that extends to the cabinet level. Records should contain the identities of personnel opening and closing the door, and records should include both the issuing and use of physical keys used to access the cabinets.

The administrative overhead under these guidelines - coupled with the risk of duplication of physical keys - means that it indirectly favors the use of an intelligent locking system according to a spokesperson from Appsilan.

According to the spokesperson, interest level from financial organizations has increased. “[It] make logical sense for [businesses] to install more intelligent security for monitoring and managing purposes at the cabinet level in the data center to ensure that data are adequately protected against physical intrusions”.

TZ waws founded in New Zealand in 1998, and moved its headquarters from Sydney Australia to Chicago Illinois in 2005.