Q&A: Dave Scott, regional sales director, Ontario, Pivot3

Canadian Security: How does Pivot3’s security solutions help cannabis related companies?

Dave Scott: Pivot3 is a software defined storage company. We take our software and apply it to Dell or Lenovo platforms X86 off the shelf hardware. What it allows us to do is offer a video backbone or ecosystem for any clients facilities so they can house their own video and scale it as required. We are also able to tolerate losses of servers and hard drives in a more risk adverse way than traditional NVRs. With this we also have the ability to bring on other mission critical or business critical applications, so clients end up with one platform as opposed to having all these siloed servers to run various applications. This allows them to handle faults more easily without disrupting their compliance with Health Canada, which can ultimately lead to being shut down.

CS: What are some of the security challenges facing the cannabis industry?

DS: I think in the early days, it was all about compliance and how fast you could get there. People weren’t really looking at business needs, risk analysis and how resilient and what kind of fault tolerance their equipment could allow. Now that these LPs are up and running they’re looking at refreshes and higher cost. Overall we’re seeing the industry get into a more efficiency model where they can’t do what they did initially. They have to tighten up and they’ve started to look at migrating all their platforms on to one set of hardware to really bring down the price per gram to really be something that they can be profitable at. I think successful operations have started to look at the resiliency and their risk tolerance as a whole. LPs are realizing that they’ve got a lot of siloed applications that they’ve got to bring together. And, they’re starting to look at migrating to the cloud, although communication infrastructure is a problem for a lot of rural properties. They are also looking at how tolerant and how risk adverse they are if they start to lose things like power or video as far as staying in compliance with Health Canada. So, they’re starting to look a little harder at their systems as more and more facilities are beginning to get knocked or shut down for non-compliance.

CS: What does the future hold for LPs looking at improving their security posture?

DS: Everyone’s always questioned the requirement for keeping video for, initially two years and now one year. What we’re seeing, as we get into edibles and as we kind of go for more efficiency models, we are starting to see video used for business needs. Everyone’s kind of anticipating that the one storage rule may get relaxed, but there’s nothing really to base that on at this point. The one-year video retention seems very strong because, even after the reduction of two years to one, cannabis companies are still effectively running data centres – or they’re confused how to migrate it to the cloud.