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Know your valuable final product

When a security manager has to decide on what technology to choose for his or her organisation, he or she normally has to depend on a consultant engineer, a security systems integrator, security trade shows or the Internet and so forth. There is a host of information for him to sift through and hopefully understand, and apply it to the organisation he or she is trying to protect.

I attended the ISC West Security Conference and Show in Las Vegas and I was not wowed by any technology that was being released for the use in security applications. The main focus all manufactures were driving towards was all wonderful new features their products have, developing new acronyms to confuse even the most seasoned consultants and security managers.

In the 20 years that I have been a security consultant nothing has changed from a security perspective as the main objective of security is to protect the valuable final product of the organisation.

Let us define what a valuable final product will be in a bank.

It is the money and the processes involved in making sure it is safe and secure when it is stored, moves and when it is handed to the individual that is withdrawing it.

Casinos around the world have perfected this art of following the valuable final product with up to 10 or 12 cameras on a single poker table, where every movement of the dealer and players are monitored to make sure that the casino never loses. Casinos can do this because their security managers have huge budgets. Not all security managers have the luxury of having this type of budget, so it is vital that security managers select the technology that will best suit their organisation’s security needs and allow the security manager to track and trace her valuable final product, no matter what it may be, through their entire organisation.

The most important consideration is, if the technology is complicated and difficult to understand, take a step back and understand the exact outcomes you need to achieve, based on your user requirements. Next take a decision based on the technology’s functionality, but never compromising your user requirements. The technology must never be retrofitted around its own functionalities.

The simpler the user requirement, the simpler it will be to select technology to be used as a tool for security managers to manage their day to day operations by following their valuable final product.

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