Biometric platform company BioConnect has launched a product that integrates biometric scanners into standard server cabinet doorlocks, so colocation providers and their customers can track who is accessing the equipment in the racks.

CabinetShield, demonstrated at the DCD>Colo+Cloud event in Dallas today, is a standard format door lock that will fit most cabinets. It has a fingerprint scanner and a card reader built in, to provide two-factor authentication at the cabinet level. This will allow colocation providers to offer authentication as a revenue-generating service, and help their customers to comply with PCI and other security requrements.

Let the right one in

“This turns rack security into a revenue stream,” said Josh Solomon, manager of data center solutions at BioConnect. BioConnect makes an agnostic platform which integrates multiple vendors’ biometric scanners, and CabinetShield was produced in response to a request from a colocation provider.

That provider, having  found there were no products ready to install into cabinet locks, set about doing the integration job, but the result was “expensive and kludgey,” Solomon said.

CabinetShield is networked and powered from one Ethernet socket using power over Ethernet, and includes a Sentry module which manages one or two locks (for front and back doors). 

It can work with fingerprint only, or card plus fingerprint authentication. Where multiple companies, or groups within one company need access to equipment, the system can provide this with an audit trail, and remote management.