If you follow the national news you could be forgiven for thinking that every industry is in a state of decay as the headlines of late have focused on nothing but economic doom and gloom.
That is of course unless you are involved in securing the London 2012 Olympics next summer: it was reported last week that security costs for the event have almost doubled!
However, despite all the negativity, the general consensus among security professionals – whether vendors, installers or specifiers – is that 2011 has been a good year.
There have been some changes and, in my experience, organisations are taking a much closer look at the investments they’ve made in security systems in recent years. They are now asking the question: ‘How can we extract more value from our security solutions and demonstrate a greater return back to the business?’
Focusing on Physical Security Information Management
As a result of this, one of the biggest talking points over the past 12 months has been PSIM (Physical Security Information Management). That trend is set to continue in 2012. Familiarise yourself with this acronym as you can bet you’ll be seeing it a lot throughout the halls of IFSEC in May!
PSIM technology has been on the market for a while and, essentially, these solutions can help security teams to absorb all of the information that’s pouring in to the Control Room and improve their response times and decision-making.
Notably this year, those organisations that were among the early adopters of such solutions (predominantly banks, airports, marine ports and harbours) have been coming forward to talk about their experiences and an often astounding return on investment that they have been able to achieve in a relatively short period of time.
Perhaps one of the biggest revelations is how these systems are not only helping security teams to improve their own operations, but also how they have been used to deliver even greater value to the wider business in areas such as facilities management, regulatory compliance and crisis planning.
Real-time video analytics
An extremely positive consequence of the surging interest in PSIM solutions has been widespread recognition of the true capabilities of real-time video analytics (a technology that I have been passionately extolling the virtues of for many years) as PSIM makes it far easier to adopt and integrate the use of advanced analytics techniques in to the day-to-day activities of the Control Room.
Also driven by PSIM but a trend in its own right is a much faster migration to IP than we have seen in recent years. This is largely due to the rising awareness, popularity and affordability of ‘hybrid video management systems’ that are gaining favour as they empower organisations to make the transition in their own time while enabling them to receive all of the benefits that an IP infrastructure can bring.
In addition, they can do this without the need to junk their existing and perfectly adequate analogue infrastructure and thus keep a much tighter control on capital expenditure.
If I’m right in my predictions (and only the next 12 months will tell) we are on the cusp of seeing big changes taking place in the Control Room and how the security operation works within an organisation.
En route to this, the agenda for 2012 will be dominated by demand for stronger systems integration and the need for tighter collaboration (particularly in the convergence of IT and security) in order to make security operations smarter, more effective and deliver greater value to the business.
Thank you for reading my blog on Info4Security this year, and I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Jamie Wilson is security marketing manager (EMEA) at NICE Systems