This past year’s COVID lockdown, abandoned offices, riots, and social unrest have shown us how important physical security is to our businesses. With data breaches mounting and hacks like Solarwinds being discovered, businesses need to make sure their physical security operations are in lockstep with their cybersecurity operations. Investing in tools that connect both can ease this process so that it is time and cost efficient, and ensures you have a unified security presence across all aspects of your business. This starts at the front door.
While the convergence of physical and digital—or phygital, if you will—worlds has been evolving for quite some time now, cybersecurity has taken more and more of the focus. But that balance shifted in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a nationwide desertion of commercial buildings. This, combined with ongoing social and political unrest, protests, and riots, put physical safety and security under a new spotlight.
Because these two worlds are more connected now than ever before, the security strategies and tools businesses deploy need to be in sync with each other. A vulnerability in real life creates a vulnerability online, and vice versa. A clear example of this was carried out at the Capitol Hill riots on January 6, where an intruder was able to steal Nancy Pelosi’s laptop from her office and smuggle it out, with plans to send it to an informant for the Russian government. Essentially, this put the government at risk of a massive cybersecurity data breach (all the data and classified communications on her computer) due to a physical breach (intruder entered her office).
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a nationwide desertion of commercial buildings. This, combined with ongoing social and political unrest, protests, and riots, put physical safety and security under a new spotlight.
Many other, less nefarious examples can be found throughout the past 12 months. While businesses remained closed and teams began to work remotely, physical security teams faced new challenges to make sure their empty offices remained protected from threats—whether it be criminal intent, severe weather, property damage or destruction from passersby, or other unexpected concerns.
Security teams needed to be able to manage their physical spaces from a remote location. Having an open-architecture security system that can tie directly into a video-surveillance system or alert you when a door is left ajar can help your teams automate and enforce this for you.
As businesses reopen and people return to buildings, health and safety requirements present different but equally significant challenges, such as enforcing social distancing, regulating temperature screenings, and reducing or eliminating common touch points that easily spread germs, such as door handles and elevator buttons. Leveraging cloud-based features that regulate and enforce these procedures right at the front door ensures these efforts don’t go to waste.
Having two sets of security postures that aren’t in sync with their virtual or physical counterparts creates more work for security staff, costs more, and overall leads to inefficiencies that can be resolved by using cloud-based tools and physical access-control technology that marries both together. That’s how to ensure your cybersecurity and physical security combine to protect your business.