Value-added distributor Westcon Group has scooped up Sentronics, a VAD dedicated to physical security, electronics and technology. Is there a trend brewing around building physical security for businesses? Maybe. Here’s the scoop on the new digs…

Sentronics, based in South Africa, will now become part of Westcon’s South Africa division dubbed Westcon SA. Westcon Group says the acquisition “comes at a time when Westcon SA is aggressively developing and expanding its video, security and data center portfolio.” By picking up Sentronics, Westcon has the ability to quickly and easily boost the security portfolio they can offer their partners. That portfolio includes a wide swath of security equipment including CCTV and video encoders. Both Westcon and Sentronics believe that physical security solutions are becoming increasingly more important to companies as a “top business issue.”

Here at The VAR Guy, we’ve detected a small trend towards physical security too. Right now, D-Link, Ingram Micro, and Paxton Access Solutions are all making moves with physical security implementation. The reason? It could be the cloud.

As virtualization, private data centers and cloud data centers build up and out, there’s also an increased footprint of space to protect. All the network protection in the world is useless if a thief can walk in an steal a hard drive or wreak actual physical damage to a data center. Even protection from terrorism is a good case for physical security integration.

VARs can take advantage of this by packaging in physical security solutions when dealing with SMBs or enterprises that are looking to expand their internal network or private cloud. At some point, it may even become converged technology, a lot like virtualization and storage and networking all have been paired together. Be sure to check in as we continue to keep tabs on the physical security trends evolving in the channel.