Over lunch recently, a former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security asked me, “How long do you think it will be until mobile credentials fully replace plastic badges and cards?”
Agencies and authorities that provide water, wastewater and dam services don’t face the same regulatory hurdles as power utilities, but they’re also often smaller and have fewer resources, housed as they generally are within municipal governments or other smaller entities.
This fall, the Ponemon Institute released its Fourth Annual study, Is Your Company Ready for a Big Data Breach? on data breach corporate preparedness, which revealed that 52 percent of companies experienced data breaches just this past year alone.
Facilities of all stripes, ranging from churches and school districts, to healthcare centers to manufacturing plants, continue to move from hard keys to electronic access, or to upgrade their existing electronic access systems.
Along with the holy grail of tighter overall security, the benefits of electronic access control systems include a better handle on who’s coming and going, the ability to restrict access to certain times and places depending on a person’s function in the organization, the ability to remotely control access, the extra assurance a company or organization can give its customers, and the lack of need for rekeying doors or replacing lost keys.
One minute and thirty-six seconds. That’s all it took for seven thieves, both men and women, dressed in hoodies and jackets that adequately concealed their identity, to enter an Apple store in Natick, Massachusetts, in a carefully coordinated heist. They were able to disable security tethers and make off with 19 iPhones, worth about $13,000.
Consolidation, technology, training and partnerships are among the watchwords for security officer firms and their clients as the calendar turns toward 2017.
Concerns about cybersecurity are overtaking those about physical security in the banking sector, although perhaps most front-burner have been issues that cross over into both realms.