Empty Offices: Low Occupancy Means High Risk
On an average year—a category which doesn’t apply to 2020—we don’t think a lot about how the people in our facilities are a positive security asset. And yet, common sense says it’s true. Every person, every pair of eyes, has an internal barometer for what “normal” is—from the card reader to the water cooler. That innate sense of normal is its own threat detection system: our people recognize when something isn’t the way it should be.
In this way, full occupancy of your facilities lessens the load your security technology must bear in preventing threats. Your security implementation may always be on, but it has a real-life back-up in the human sense for outlier people and events. Major corporations are leaving their employees remote or partially remote well-into 2021, making the critical assets inside the walls of your facilities increasingly vulnerable now and into the future.
Enter COVID-19
The disruptive power of the COVID pandemic and accompanying recession for enterprise businesses is hard to overestimate. But one critical area has remained absent from the conversation. How does the absence of personnel on the property change the security risk? And what does this mean for the SecTech (security technology) we all depend on?
The simple answer is this: in a low occupancy environment, the technology has to work harder. The integration from fiber-optic perimeter to access control to cyber all have to outperform. Let’s take a look at the vulnerabilities that low occupancy brings for standard security systems and ask the question: what innovations are required to adjust to this new world?
Threat Prevention: When the building and the parking lot are full of familiars, we have the benefit of additional sets of eyes to watch over the company’s valued people, facilities, and reputation. Without them, the cameras are doing all the work. Unfortunately, in many facilities, the cameras are passive actors, gathering footage, but doing nothing to prevent entry. Video systems need empowered upgrades from the kind of innovations that SAGE is actively testing: facial recognition, employee profile comparison, and other features that recognize when someone is on-premise that shouldn’t be and proactively responds.
Access Control: One of the primary weaknesses of traditional card readers is the ability of an employee to hand-off (or lose) their keycard to another person. When employees were coming in every day, knowledge of their keycard location was imperative to their work life. Today, millions of idle entry cards are sitting about in residences, on key chains, in automobiles. Access control that simply counts enters and exits can do little to prevent real risk. Enterprises serious about threat prevention need to consider the power of biometric access control integrated into the power, HVAC, and Active Directory systems. These person-centric access managers are powered by the advanced bandwidth and cybersecurity of OSDP, the only fully encrypted access control communication protocol.
Cybersecurity: Are your cybersecurity efforts and your physical security systems integrated? In a post-COVID world, they need to be. As employees move fluidly from on-prem to distance work, the line between cyber and physical risk management is blurred to non-existence. Your system needs to know when every employee is “on” whether they are doing so from their home, from a public place, or from within the walls of the facility. And the security protections that defend your organization and your people need to be consistent regardless of their location. SAGE’s modernized systems design assumes a workforce distributed globally and free-to-work in-office or remote. Our designed defend against both cyber and physical threats, understanding how intertwined they are in today’s workplace.
Digital Transformation is No Longer Optional
The effects of COVID-19 have accelerated digital transformation across every sector and industry, and yet the security industry has been slow to respond. We continue to talk to industry leaders that are quite comfortable with SecTech being five or ten years behind the technology expectations of other industries. We, at SAGE, are not comfortable with this. Invasive bad actors will not engage your facilities with antiquated technology. They will attempt to disrupt your business and your reputation with the most modern of intrusions. Our security apparatus must be just as, if not more, advanced.
Many security integrators are waiting for their clients to push them into innovation. This is malpractice. It is the responsibility of the industry to offer the client a modernized path to threat prevention, and the on-prem transformation that COVID has presented only accelerates that requirement.