By John Bekisz, Vice President, Data Center & Critical Infrastructure Practice, Guidepost Solutions

Too often, security is treated as a checklist item, an afterthought brought in when the concrete is already poured and the budget is nearly gone. I’ve been called into projects at that stage more times than I can count—when design decisions are locked in, construction is underway, and the room for meaningful change is slim. The result? Compromises, costly change orders, and security solutions that don’t live up to their potential.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Over my career, I’ve had the privilege of seeing projects evolve from a blank sheet of paper into fully realized, functioning spaces, where security was considered from day one, not day 101. And the difference is night and day.

Experience is a harsh teacher, but a thorough one. Over the years, I’ve seen recurring patterns—specific areas where early security input could have saved significant time, money, and headaches, while simultaneously enhancing the safety and security of the final building. It’s not just about cameras and alarms; it’s about integrating security thinking into the very fabric of the design.

Engaging Security Consultants Early: The Key to Project Success

If there’s one thing experience has made clear, it’s this: involving a security consultant early isn’t beneficial, it’s essential. Waiting too long almost always leads to missed opportunities and costly fixes.

So, I’m sharing four critical lessons from the field. Real-world moments across key project phases where early security input will make all the difference and the future-you will thank you.

Lesson 1: Site Selection and Vehicle Approach – Start from the Beginning

Before a single line is drawn on a blueprint, the choice of site and how vehicles approach it lays the groundwork for the entire security posture. This is arguably the earliest phase where security input provides immense value, often overlooked until it’s too late, with major implications on site layout, landscaping, earthwork, and perimeter.

The Late Engagement Nightmare: Imagine a nearly finalized site plan for a new data center. The main entrance road curves gracefully towards the building, aesthetically pleasing but offering a direct, high-speed approach vector right up to the lobby doors. The landscaping plan includes dense shrubbery close to walkways, creating potential hiding spots. Parking is situated in a way that offers poor natural surveillance from the main building. By the time a security consultant is engaged, often just to lay out spots and dots of security technology, fixing these issues means expensive retrofits: hostile vehicle mitigation (HVM) systems that weren’t budgeted for, redesigning traffic flow, potentially sacrificing prime parking spots, or implementing extensive landscape alterations. These changes ripple through civil engineering drawings, landscape architecture plans, and budgets, causing delays and friction.

The Early Engagement Advantage: When involved during site selection or initial concept design, a security consultant analyzes the site using core principles like Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) and through the performance of an extensive Threat and Vulnerability Risk Assessment (TVRA). This includes assessing the property, neighbors, building and site orientation, natural surveillance opportunities, territorial reinforcement, access control points, and crucial vehicle standoff distances, as well as advising on optimal building placement to maximize natural barriers or observation. Working closely with civil engineers and landscape architects ensures approach roads are designed to naturally slow traffic, landscape features are incorporated to enhance visibility rather than obstruct it, and parking areas are strategically placed. During this phase, security consultants will consider the placement of technology to prepare the site for future security technology.  Hostile vehicle mitigation (HVM) can be integrated seamlessly and cost-effectively into the site design from the start, often using dual-purpose elements like reinforced planters or strategically placed site furniture, rather than appearing as a military-style addition. Getting this right early will save time and coordination later, as well as ensure a cohesive design from the start that blends with the initial vision of the data center.

Lesson 2: Space Programming – Designing Security In, Not Bolting It On

Space programming is the architect’s process of defining the functional requirements of spaces within a building – their size, location, and adjacency. The many ways visitors, employees, and contractors enter and move through a facility, along with how adjacencies support operations and space programming, all have a direct impact on security, safety, and operational efficiency. Preparing for and planning dedicated security spaces is no doubt vital, but the real power of early engagement lies in reviewing and defining the layout and adjacencies of all key functional areas to build security in from the ground up.

The Late Engagement Nightmare: I’ve been involved in several designs where we were asked to provide electronic security measures to protect executive areas. Overspending on electronics doesn’t fix the problem that executive areas have been placed adjacent to a heavily trafficked semi-public corridor or even an uncontrolled building exit, offering minimal privacy and presenting an easy surveillance or access risk. Adding layers of access control and video surveillance later feels intrusive and may conflict with the desired executive aesthetic.

In many projects, the loading dock is designed as one large undifferentiated space. Delivery drivers mingle freely near sensitive storage areas, incoming goods aren’t easily segregated for screening, and personnel access from the dock into the main facility isn’t channeled through a control point. This becomes an operational bottleneck and a major security loophole, difficult to fix without significant structural changes.

I’ve seen critical rooms like the Fire Command Centers (FCC) and Security Command Centers (SCC) located in a high-traffic, easily accessible ground floor area, making them vulnerable during an incident. Or worse, they are adjacent to a lobby or loading dock. Sometimes they are combined into a single small room without considering distinct operational needs, workflows, acoustic separation, or survivability requirements for each function. Relocating these vital hubs later is complex and costly.

The Early Engagement Advantage: Bringing a security consultant into the space programming phase allows the security program to start at the concept phases and permeate the entire project through completion. This allows for:

  • Strategic Adjacencies with proposed layouts to identify potential risks based on how spaces relate; recommended buffer zones (like controlled reception areas or secondary corridors) around sensitive areas like executive or client suites, key mechanical areas, or data halls, and fundamentally designed circulation paths that naturally channel visitors or staff through appropriate control points.
  • Controlled Transitions for parking garages or loading docks with strategic layouts that facilitate necessary security programs while not inhibiting the operations of clients, facilities, and security.
  • Critical Hub Optimization at optimal locations designed for critical infrastructure like the FCC and SCC, considering factors like accessibility for first responders, security, and low public visibility, structural protection, power/data redundancy, and the specific functional requirements and workflows of each. This step will help determine if co-location is appropriate or if separation is needed. Additionally, ensuring that guest services for lobby visitors that may be served by security are not compromised, and the appropriate level of protection is provided at the lobby, loading dock, and other key areas.
  • Right-Sizing Security Spaces for dedicated security areas such as  standoff distances, mechanical entry points, control rooms, equipment closets, screening points, and secure storage are appropriately sized, located for optimal function (e.g., control room overseeing main entry), and equipped with the necessary infrastructure (power, HVAC, data connectivity) right from the start.

Lesson 3: Door Hardware Coordination – The Devil in the Details (and the Door Schedule)

Doors, doors, doors! Ask any architect or contractor what the most complicated part of a project is, and they’ll usually say door hardware coordination. Door hardware is the simplest and most frequently used object in our daily lives and is a cornerstone of good design and functionality. Whether a door is electrified or not, doors are the gateways by which we control and protect key access interfaces with a building in a raw, physical way. They are the primary physical barrier in any security plan, and their hardware is surprisingly complex, involving multiple disciplines and intricate coordination.

The Late Engagement Nightmare: Coordination between the architect, security consultant, electrical engineer, and door hardware consultant, if there even is one, should not happen after 50% construction documentation, but I’ll tell you, it often does. At this point in the project, the architect has specified their choice of aesthetic door handles, and the electrical engineer has planned power for electric strikes, but the security systems require specific card readers and door position switches that conflict with the chosen hardware or frame type. The fire code typically requires specific egress devices (panic bars) that haven’t been coordinated with the access control locks. Power supplies for locking hardware weren’t properly specified or located. The result? A frantic scramble during construction, incompatible hardware arriving on site, doors that don’t lock, frames that are not prepped, emergency change orders, installation delays, blown budgets, and endless coordination headaches between the architect, electrical contractor, security integrator, and door hardware supplier. The door hardware schedule becomes a bloody battlefield.

The Early Engagement Advantage: By working alongside the architect and MEP (mechanical/electrical/plumbing) engineers during schematic design and design development, security consultants will help ensure a complete integration with chosen finishes, hardware, and adjacent disciplines. The proposed hardware against security requirements (access control, locking mechanisms, monitoring sensors like door position switches and request-to-exit devices) is reviewed to  specify the exact hardware needed – compatible readers, electrified locks (strikes, maglocks, electrified mortise/cylindrical locks), power supplies, exit devices, and monitoring contacts that align with the client’s security program requirements. The door schedule should accurately reflect these coordinated requirements before procurement begins. This early coordination prevents conflicts, streamlines installation, reduces costly change orders, and results in doors that function correctly and securely from day one.

Lesson 4: HVAC, Internal Partitions, and Unseen Pathways – Securing the Data Center Core

Data center success and reliability is driven by uptime, environmental control, and efficient cooling. Mechanical and electrical systems, particularly the massive HVAC infrastructure and the necessary partitioning between zones, are literally the life support systems of the facility. However, if not considered through a security lens from the earliest design stages, these essential operational systems can create significant, often overlooked, physical security vulnerabilities. Data center architects and developers often neglect this intersection, which can lead to costly retrofits, operational disruptions, and unacceptable risks to the critical assets before the data center even comes online.

The Late Engagement Nightmare: When brought into a data center project after the core designs are set in stone, I often find cavernous HVAC plenums that were engineered purely for sufficient airflow and wide-open, unsecured superhighways straight into the heart of the facility. I’ve seen permeable mesh walls used between MEP spaces and data halls, selected without security input, which are made of material that can be easily cut or even allow contraband and recording devices to pass through. This can potentially offer unintended lines of sight into secure data halls. Essential details such as adequately screening large air intakes against contaminants or unauthorized devices may be overlooked. Furthermore, the necessary high-velocity airflow, equipment vibration, or even the visual properties of mesh partitions can interfere with security sensor placement, leading to a chaotic flood of nuisance alarms that mask real threats. Compounding these issues, maintenance access points for critical equipment often lack appropriate monitoring or procedural controls, inadvertently creating opportunities for security breaches during routine servicing.

The Early Engagement Advantage: Security consultants can transform these potential liabilities into integrated security strengths through:

  • Securing Airflow Pathways to analyze HVAC designs from a security perspective. This includes specifying security grilles, bars, or smaller duct sections within large plenums/ducts that could permit human access, especially where they cross security boundaries, as well as advising on the secure location and physical protection of air intakes, incorporating appropriate screening and filtration against physical intrusion and contaminants.
  • Hardening of Internal Boundaries for essential permeable barriers like mesh walls between MEP spaces and data halls. Proper material and gauge selection balances airflow requirements with physical security needs (e.g., specifying heavier gauge, intrusion-resistant mesh) and prepares for the appropriate electronic security sensing countermeasures. Incorporating visual barriers where needed and, critically, integrating intrusion detection directly on the mesh structure (e.g., vibration sensors, analytics-monitored cameras) is a critical part of the data hall’s layered security. Proper sealing around all penetrations through any wall type should also be scrutinized.
  • Integrating Sensor Design and Secure Maintenance to ensure security sensor layouts are optimized for data center environments, avoiding placement conflicts with HVAC outputs, equipment vibration, or partitioning that could degrade performance or cause nuisance alarms. This includes recommending specific sensor types tolerant of the environment. Furthermore, secure, monitored access procedures and points for mechanical equipment requiring maintenance within or near secure zones will need to be well designed to ensure serviceability doesn’t compromise security.

Security as an Investment, Not an Expense

I share these four lessons to provide insight into the challenges encountered on past projects, with the goal of informing and supporting future efforts. Data centers are being built fast, and often, security is overlooked. I want to underscore a fundamental truth: getting the right security expertise and consulting early in the project transforms security from a potential cost overrun and logistical headache into a well-managed, effectively integrated component of the building’s design and function. Site selection, space programming, door hardware, and even HVAC/curtain wall design all have security implications that are far easier and cheaper to address proactively than reactively. Whether you are a site manager, facility director, developer, architect, or anyone along the line, partnering with the right security consultant from the start can make you the hero of the project.

Early collaboration isn’t an added expense; it’s an investment in a safer, more secure, and ultimately more successful project, saving significant costs and complications down the line.