While world economies face additional challenges and unemployment seems chronic, many enterprises, often awash in cash, have increased their investment in computer and communications technologies. According to Gardner Research, worldwide IT spending is forecast to total $3.67 trillion in 2011, a 7.1-percent increase from $3.43 trillion in 2010. Gartner has raised its outlook for 2011 from its previous forecast of 5.6 percent growth.
Good advice to everyone but an anteater. Wedged between last month’s ASIS International event with all of its technology dazzle and this month’s International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) conference in Chicago, got me thinking of the people side of risk management and crime fighting.
From day one, people told me that security should be proactive and not reactive. At ASIS International 2011 this month, thousands of security professionals will talk business, budgets, technology, threats and the need to keep one step ahead. One step ahead of whom and what is the challenge that makes reactive the unfortunate fallback.
This issue of Security magazine features the most influential people in security. An annual spotlight, the list boasts the best and brightest. But anyone can be influential, one way or another. Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another, said Napoleon Hill, the author of many success books. A Time magazine poll of the most influential people recently found Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao on top. If you know him from the boxing ring, his influence spread wider last year when he won a seat in his country’s Congress — and won it by a landslide.
Who would have thought that if we put on an international terror trial in Chicago with a cast of bad guys, including a self-confessed two-timing spy, secret documents, a shady Chicago businessman and testimony of alleged involvement by Pakistani ex-military officers in the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 170 people including six U.S. citizens, who would have figured that no one would show up for the trial?
My first meeting with security executives in Chicago in the early 1980s included some of those attendees getting into a fist fight, due in great part to the “two-fer” beverage policy at the now and should-have-been-then-closed policy of the Chicago Millionaire’s Club. No doubt, it’s good to see passion. But, overall, security has been in an obvious struggle within their organizations for many years, more often over budgets.
And then found. Among the cameras, servers, alarms, readers, smart cards and other dazzlers at last month’s ISC West in Las Vegas, the technology-centric security trade show, a reasonably new face appeared, seemingly out of thin air. Call it cloud computing or hosted services or remote managed services or software as a service or video as a service.
There was a time when people defined privacy as the right to be left alone, spurred by Supreme Court Justices way back when who saw the need to protect from the intrusion of instant cameras, of all things. Then there was a 2.0 definition that required a person to show harm of a so-called privacy violation in such areas as intrusion upon seclusion, appropriate of name or likeness, publicity given to private life, and publicity placing a person in a false light.
The economy is now challenging chief executive officers, chief security officers, hiring professionals, contract officer service firms and local law enforcement. Just as the global economy has tied together countries