Physical Security, Meet Digital Security
The lines between physical security and digital security continue to blur, and the integration of the two is accelerating. The combination is powerful, and implies entirely new ways of thinking about the world.
- Physical door locks are now often software controlled, and have integrated cameras and motion sensors. The software, embedded in the device and/or in the cloud, may include facial recognition and other advanced features that will allow your door to open automatically for certain people or services (yourself, the plumber, a package delivery), or to record and alert you to unusual behavior. Of course, all this software may be hacked, so while your old physical door lock had one major attack vector, your connected system now has to address both physical and digital threats.
- Keeping your kids safe use to be bimodal — you ensured that they were physically safe in one way, and monitored their online safety separately. Now it is widely recognized that online behavior affects physical behavior, and that a smartphone with GPS in an important component of your child’s physical safety. Digital and physical safety are merging.
- Guard management systems, like Inovia portfolio company Tracktik, move what was fundamentally a physical service into a combined physical-software service. By intelligently scheduling, tracking, and managing your human guards, you can provide better physical security.
- IoT devices, such as cameras, routers, and motion detectors use to be stand-alone services. Now they are being augmented with services that also provide security signals. Each device must be digitally secure in order to trust it’s overall input into a security context.
The list can go on and on. However, these services are often point solutions; a company provides a vertically integrated single-mode service. Your camera tells you one thing, your connected carbon monoxide detector another, and your smart thermostat a third. This is true in your home, but is even more acute in enterprise settings.
Establishing a ‘context’ from all these inputs (both physical and digital) and deciding on a course of action is the next frontier for the convergence of physical and digital safety and security.
Consider, for example, how you would keep a large crowded venue safe — both in day-to-day operations (crowd control, traffic management) and unusual events (dangerous gatherings, gunshot detected, system hacked). By establishing and maintaining an overall context (what all the IoT devices are ‘seeing’, where all the people are, the expected behavior for the current type of event) and also recognizing exceptions (unusual gatherings, strange crowd movements, unexpected sights or sounds), you can better manage the overall safety and security of people, places, and events. In many ways this can be seen as the extension of digital security best practices to include physical assets and physical signals. There are physical equivalents of intrusions, behavioral anomalies, malware, active attacks, unauthorized access, etc.
We see this trend — the blending of physical and digital security and safety — as an accelerating space. That is why we are excited to be supporting Armored Things in their mission to keep large venues (arenas, stadiums, corporate campuses, universities, schools) safe and secure. By integrating all of the inputs, establishing context, and then carrying out or recommending actions, Armored Things provides a higher level context than any individual vertical component can. This is essential not only for dealing with exceptional events, but also for optimizing how large venues operate on a day-to-day basis. Armored Things has brought together experts from all sides — digital security, physical security, complex operational integration — to build a system that fulfills this need.
The world has lots of technology. It’s important that it is used to keep us all safe, and to make our experiences at events and gatherings seamless and enjoyable. This is the next frontier in physical+digital security.
