Bollards, barriers and barbed wire — these mainstays of perimeter hardware are still key elements of a comprehensive perimeter protection strategy, providing physical obstacles to intruders. As the potential threat vectors to a perimeter have grown in sophistication, so too have these protection technologies, most notably with the addition of sensors that detect and report back to a central security command center overseeing the perimeter.
The equipping of physical barriers with sensors is only a small part of the evolution. Today’s modern perimeter technologies can include video surveillance cameras equipped with sophisticated video analytics, intrusion detection systems, radar, seismic detection and other environmental sensors. All of these data points are likely fed back into a security operations center (SOC) where human operators are tasked with verifying, analyzing and responding to each individual alarm from this network of sensors.