Amanah Tech Inc. uses Verkada cameras, access control, and air quality sensors to secure customer infrastructure, support SOC 2 auditability, and manage its Toronto data center from anywhere.
Impact at a Glance
Reduces investigation time from 30–45 minutes or longer to under five minutes
Cuts manual monitoring time by approximately 90%
Supports SOC 2 auditability with access logs and video-backed records
Enables remote door access, video review, and environmental alerts from anywhere
Helps strengthen customer confidence in physical security and uptime
Built on trust, from one server to one of Canada’s most connected buildings
Amanah Tech Inc. has been built on a simple idea: reliable infrastructure should be accessible, affordable, and rooted in trust. Founded in 2001 by Nezar Freeny with one server, a storage room, and a grant from the Canadian Youth Business Foundation, now known as Futurpreneur Canada, Amanah has grown into a privately held, Canadian-owned data center provider serving businesses that need dependable infrastructure without unpredictable costs or foreign ownership concerns.
Today, Amanah operates from 151 Front Street West in Toronto, one of Canada’s most connected carrier hotels. Its customers run everything from AI workloads and MSP infrastructure to VPN services and SaaS platforms. For these businesses, infrastructure is not theoretical. Their servers, applications, and customer data are live, operational, and business-critical.
“When you’re running a colocation facility, the servers belong to the customer, but the building, power, and access are your responsibility,” said Nezar Freeny, CEO of Amanah Tech Inc. “That makes you the last line of defense against unauthorized physical access to someone else’s critical infrastructure.”
For Amanah, physical security is part of the customer promise.
“Security is about trust,” said Freeny. “For someone to feel secure, there has to be trust. The two go hand in hand — you can’t have one without the other.”
Modernizing physical security for a 24/7 data center environment
Before Verkada, Amanah relied on a more traditional physical security setup. Cameras and access control were in place, but they operated as separate systems. If a customer asked who had accessed a certain area or what happened near their equipment, the Amanah team had to manually piece together the answer.
The process often required checking access logs, finding the relevant timestamp, opening a separate camera system, scrubbing through footage, and manually matching video to the access event. For a 24/7 data center, that created unnecessary friction.
“If a customer called and asked about activity near their equipment, getting a clear answer took longer than it should have,” said Freeny. “The team had to check the access log, pull the right camera footage, and manually match timestamps to understand what happened.”
In some cases, the request required a system administrator to sit through video playback until movement appeared. That was not the experience Amanah wanted to deliver to its customers.
Unifying access control, video, and environmental visibility in Verkada
Amanah deployed Verkada cameras, access control, and air quality sensors across its office and data center. With Verkada Command, the team can now manage access, review footage, monitor environmental conditions, and respond to events from a single platform.
“What Verkada provides is more dynamic security,” said Freeny. “It gives us stronger monitoring, clearer visibility, and easier access to what’s happening in the data center. And it’s not just something we tell clients — we can show them, and they can see it for themselves.”
With Verkada access control, Amanah can manage who enters the building and data center, assign access by role or time window, and enable or disable credentials remotely. Staff, contractors, customers, and visitors can be given the right level of access based on what they need — without creating unnecessary risk.
For example, if a contractor or visitor needs access for a limited period, Amanah can schedule access for a specific window. If a delivery arrives, the team can remotely unlock the door, verify activity with video, and lock it again without needing someone physically onsite.
That flexibility is especially valuable in a multitenant colocation environment, where different users may need access to specific areas at different times. By bringing access control and video together, Amanah can verify activity, maintain a clearer record of events, and reduce the manual work previously required to understand what happened.
Answering customer questions in minutes, not hours
One of the most valuable improvements for Amanah is the ability to quickly answer customer questions about access.
A typical scenario might involve a customer asking, “Who accessed my rack at 4:50 in the morning?” Before Verkada, answering that question required pulling logs, finding the right time window, searching camera footage, and manually verifying what happened.
With Verkada, Amanah can now pull up the access event, review the associated footage, capture a snapshot, and share it if needed.
“With Verkada, access activity is natively integrated with video,” said Freeny. “We can see who entered the data center, when they accessed it, and then review the corresponding footage to understand exactly what happened.”
The workflow has reduced investigation time from 30–45 minutes or longer to under five minutes. Just as importantly, it has made those investigations accessible to more people on the team. Instead of routing every request through a system administrator, authorized team members can find the information they need directly.
For Amanah, that speed has a direct business impact. When customers have questions about their infrastructure, being able to respond quickly helps build confidence, remove uncertainty, and show customers how their environment is protected.
Supporting SOC 2 auditability and customer compliance
Many of Amanah’s customers have their own security and compliance requirements. Because customers rely on Amanah to protect the physical infrastructure behind their workloads, access control and auditability are part of the trust equation.
Amanah is SOC 2 Type II certified, and Verkada helped support the audit process by making access logs easier to retrieve and share.
“As part of our SOC 2 process, we were able to pull the audit logs we needed directly from Verkada and provide them to the auditor,” said Freeny. “That visibility made the process much easier for our team.”
That audit trail is valuable not only for Amanah’s own compliance program, but also for customers who need reassurance that their infrastructure is protected by strong physical controls. With Verkada, Amanah has access to both historical records and real-time visibility, helping the team support audits while continuing to monitor activity across the data center.
Protecting uptime with environmental alerts
In a data center, uptime depends on more than access control. Temperature and environmental conditions are also critical, especially as workloads become more power-dense.
Amanah uses Verkada air quality sensors in the data center to monitor temperature and alert the team when conditions move outside defined thresholds. For Freeny, the value is simple: he wants to know about issues before customers do.
With Verkada, Amanah can configure alerts so the right people are notified when a threshold is exceeded. That gives the team greater visibility into environmental conditions that could affect equipment performance or uptime.
“If there’s an incident, we know about it right away,” said Freeny. “In this business, surprises are the last thing you want. If there’s a problem, we want to catch it before our clients are ever impacted.”
Managing the data center from anywhere
For a founder-led company operating a 24/7 facility, remote visibility has changed how Amanah manages day-to-day operations. Freeny no longer needs to be physically onsite to check footage, verify activity, or understand what is happening in the facility.
“You don’t have to be physically onsite to stay in control,” said Freeny. “With Verkada, we can access the information and tools we need from anywhere.”
That visibility has reduced anxiety and given Amanah greater operational flexibility. Rather than constantly watching cameras or relying on someone else to pull footage, the team can configure alerts and review events as they happen. Freeny estimates that Verkada has cut manual monitoring time by approximately 90%.
That same flexibility has also improved response times for opening and closing doors, since the team can manage access remotely instead of dispatching someone onsite. Whether Freeny is onsite, at home, or traveling, the team can still see what is happening and respond quickly.
Physical security and cybersecurity now work together
As Amanah expands its infrastructure to support AI, dense compute, and cloud repatriation, Freeny sees physical security becoming even more important. Customers are running more critical workloads, and expectations around facility visibility, access control, and accountability continue to rise.
“Security is the top priority today, whether it’s cybersecurity or physical security,” said Freeny. “If someone can’t get in online, they may try to get in physically. That’s why cyber and physical security have to work together.”
As customer environments become more valuable, Amanah expects demand for stronger physical security to continue growing. The more critical the data, the more important it becomes to give customers confidence in the physical infrastructure protecting it.
Looking ahead, Amanah plans to expand its use of Verkada as the facility grows. Some clients have already expressed interest in dedicated cameras and more granular access visibility for their own racks or cages. For Amanah, that creates an opportunity to extend Verkada beyond the broader data center and into customer-specific environments — helping the team support multitenant access needs while maintaining a clear record of who accessed a space, when, and what happened on video.
“As we physically grow, some clients want their own cameras and their own access visibility for their racks,” said Freeny. “That’s where we see an opportunity to extend Verkada beyond the broader data center and into the specific environments our clients need to protect.”
Peace of mind for Amanah and its customers
For Amanah, Verkada is not just a security system. It is a way to deliver the accountability customers expect from a trusted data center partner.
With unified cameras, access control, and environmental monitoring, Amanah can verify activity, manage access, support audits, respond to customer questions, and monitor the facility from anywhere.
“I would summarize Verkada in one phrase: peace of mind,” said Freeny. “We can share video with clients, open and lock doors remotely, and manage the facility with confidence from anywhere.”