My background is not in the Physical Security Industry. IP cameras, card readers, glass break sensors, motion detectors and all of the traditional physical security technology used by physical security integrators are foreign to me. My background is that of a solution architect. My experiences are within the IT stack otherwise known as the “architecture” or “framework”.

IT professionals use this architecture or framework to answer business process questions like:

• What are my clients trying to do?
• Why is it valuable?
• Who does what when?
• What information do they touch and need?
• Where does this activity take place?
• What does the user experience?
• How do we measure the effectiveness (performance) over time?
• How do we report on that data and how is it used?

This information, once captured, helps business leaders answer where technology and processes fit within the architecture and how that architecture aligns to the strategic needs of an organization. This architecture gives companies the much needed road map to future technology acquisitions, avoiding non-standard, proprietary approaches that lock them out of important advances in technology over time.

This philosophy, while standard in the IT world, is just as foreign to the physical security world as a card reader, IP camera, or video management system is to an IT person.

That leads me to my role at Pro-Tec Design. Ultimately my role is to help create a unified, enterprise class, security architecture or framework that will guide an organization’s purchase of security technology and the security policies they wrap around their business processes. At the heart, this is what convergence is truly about. Developing a unified security framework from which all security policy, security technology (card readers, IP cameras, video management software, access control systems, etc) are deployed within an organization.

The process for creating this security architecture is really the same process followed in the IT industry when doing strategic planning activities. The process is predictable, defensible, and strategic in nature. Here are the highlights.

1. Learn Trends (Understand where you are at and where you want to go)
2. Develop Strategies (Compare, strategize, and design the framework)
3. Select Technology (Evaluate and implement technology to fit inside the frame)
4. Improve Operations (Measure the performance against the baseline and improve the framework)

This process, mapped against an organizations strategic plan, provides for (or creates) the security framework. Security Executives and managers can use this framework to measure the current state against the desired state. This becomes a formal process from which benchmarking can be performed against similar businesses as well as against the desired future state. The security framework is used to analyze future purchases, organizational changes, and ensure the security function is performing as specified. This process can be shown graphically as in the diagram shown here.

All the elements to create a unified security architecture and provision the application called ‘security’ already exists. The term ‘Convergence’ while getting a lot of buzz in the industry, is useful as a verb, but it is really but more important to develop the underlying architecture that can be used to optimize the application called ‘Security’. We call this the Unified Security Architecture.

As you begin to think about security as an application and how to create a framework or architecture for security keep these important questions in mind:

» How do you measure the performance of your Security System?

» Physical Security ?

» Cyber Security?

» When did you last audit your system for:

» Performance

» Placement (Location)

» Usability

» Reliability

» Sustainability

» What is the gap between your baseline system today and the performance expectations from:

» Your company

» Your industry

» Your Regulatory agencies

» Do you have a trusted source for evaluating your compliance with regulatory bodies before you are audited?

» Have you considered a consolidation of budget and resources around the key architectural elements of data, applications, and integration?

» Can you save time and money and resources from such a study?

» How would your business meet its mission better by including the benchmark of business optimization within the Security Mission and Performance Objective?

Pro-Tec’s mission is to understand all these elements and provide strategic direction and, if necessary, the professional services and resources needed to create the collaborative team that will move our client’s to a unified model over time.

Through this evolution in the security function we will move our clients from a non-strategic security function to a unified strategic security framework that aligns with an organization’s mission, vision and values. By creating this security architecture, we are witnessing an inflection point of value. For organizations that recognize it, belong the spoils of a strategic security infrastructure with its underlying implication of competitive advantage. As Steve Hunt, one of the premier analysts and strategists of security said:

“There is a dawning happening that the stuff of security actually is data. And what did we do the last time we were faced with millions of bits of unstructured data? We organized it with computers, software and networking. This is what we do with millions of bits of data. We use a standard, best-practice IT infrastructure. And that’s the revolution.”

And that is what a security framework or architecture does. Are you ready for the challenge?