Data-Driven Physical Security Comes of Age

By Ajay Jain
President and CEO, Vector Flow

Trends, Topics and Technologies

One of the biggest challenges faced by security professionals is the ability to harness and analyze the tremendous volume of data being generated by physical security operations containing spatial, sensor and transactional data and network of devices to derive meaningful actionable intelligence. With the bulk of such data being unstructured data, new data-driven solutions are desperately required to contextualize all this disparate and fragmented information to induce major impact in the way current processes and functions are conducted.

One of the reasons this presents such a daunting challenge is that physical security operations typically employ several different point-of-control systems and associated sensors / Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies such as Physical Access Control Systems (PACS), video surveillance, intrusion sensors, biometrics, visitor management, dispatch, incident management systems and more. For the most part, these systems are not highly integrated and provide siloed views of activity which fail to provide a complete picture, precluding intelligent insights from being drawn since all the data is not being analyzed in the same context.

There are three steps that need to be taken to overcome this challenge:

1. Bring data from these otherwise disparate system technologies together onto a special purpose unified platform.

2. Understand how and where to use this newly found data intelligence to improve business processes.

3. Make this all very simple for users to incorporate into business operations.

New developments in artificial intelligence (AI)-powered software platforms can help alleviate both physical and cyber threats by inferencing from large volumes of data to quickly triangulate small subsets of pertinent information and provide actionable insights. This not only simplifies and improves physical security operations while delivering tangible return on investment and lowering the total cost of ownership, it also automates major security functions related to physical identity and access operations (PIAM), security operation center (SOC) automation and cyber-physical security defense.

Advanced data-driven solutions are now coming to market that address many of the industry’s inherent legacy system and data integration challenges. There are platforms on the market capable of processing and analyzing vast amounts of data from otherwise disparate security systems, data stores and input devices. The solutions can derive actionable intelligence from physical security data using advanced AI and machine learning algorithms that empower advanced automated physical security applications. Such solutions present myriad opportunities for digital transformation and improving several major business processes including: PIAM, SOC automation, and cyber-physical security.

Data-driven physical security is already changing the landscape of the rapidly emerging physical cybersecurity landscape by applying the latest advancements in deep learning to automate physical security systems and operations. What we were once looking forward to as a futuristic solution has finally arrived.