The satellite imaging power of Google Maps is being used to give IT managers a birds-eye view of their facilities and Internet connections in a security information management product developed by start-up FireScope.

Say you have a dozen facilities spread throughout the United States. In the Google Maps component of the FireScope dashboard, you can look at a U.S. map with a marker for each facility and receive instant reporting if there is a problem with the availability, performance or security of one of those systems.

Click to see: Google maps dashboard

A red flashing light – or whatever other indicator you might choose – would notify you of a problem, and then you can click on the location to find more information about what is going wrong and to connect to programs that will resolve the problem.

Mark Lynd, president of the Los Angeles-based FireScope, was previously Global CTO at Hudson Advisors in Dallas where he became frustrated by the disjointed nature of event reporting.

“We had locations all over the world,” Lynd says. “I wanted a simple view to see if we were having an issue at one of our sites. … That was the genesis of this. I was a frustrated IT operator.”

FireScope launched in August and began selling its appliances in November, according to Lynd. The price range goes from $10,000 to $100,000, and the price includes the first year of maintenance, he says.

Lynd says FireScope has seven customers, including Telscape, a local phone exchange carrier serving the Hispanic market in California. Between San Diego and Los Angeles, Telscape has 105 co-location sites containing network management and access gateways, says Joe Holop, the company’s CIO. The company also has about 18 stores and kiosks.

Holop says other mapping tools don’t provide the proper linkage to system monitoring programs. With FireScope, clicking on a satellite image of a location can bring up diagrams of IT systems and feedback about the health and well-being of systems, he says. Alerts are triggered based on thresholds related to CPU, storage or bandwidth utilization.

“In our case we can bring up a map of Southern California. It’s actually showing where we have our locations. Then we can point and click on particular locations and bring that up and start doing a drill-down of what’s in the location,” he says.

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