One central finds efficiency in the cloud

Home Security Monitoring Center, a family-owned wholesale central station based in Stowe, Vt., is focusing on virtualization, “Putting more and more information up on the cloud,” according to company president Scott Trowbridge. The company mainly uses the cloud for business efficiency.

Trowbridge said that HSMC has been using the cloud for years, but named it as a priority moving into 2016 and beyond. “It's not going to be done tomorrow. …  Having to commit to something like that is a very big choice. … It's one of those things that doesn't make you money, it just … saves time and makes you more efficient.”

The company uses the cloud to store information that is relevant for the “daily running of the business,” according to Trowbridge. Fewer computers means lower power consumption and fewer IT issues, “it makes us more cost-effective to push things into the cloud to some degree.”

The cloud makes the company more flexible, Trowbridge told me, both in terms of getting information and notifications to dealers as well as allowing staff access to information while not in the office.

“We've got to be very careful about how we put [information] into the cloud, and making sure that the most critical information—customer's information—stays local so that it doesn't get compromised,” he said.

In addition, by leveraging the cloud, workstations in HSMC are able to access a variety of functions from one spot, allowing employees to pick up their work at any location.

Trowbridge says that the company cross-trains its employees, “In order to keep things interesting and fresh, we try to rotate tasks out for our operators to … round-out the education.” These roles range from alarm monitoring to data entry and putting accounts on and off test.