Dive Brief:
- Although a majority of organizations believe they would pass a security compliance audit if it occurred today, 44% of organizations can’t confidently say who was in their building yesterday, according to Envoy, which surveyed over 1,000 enterprise leaders.
- Most companies believe they spend enough money on physical security, but almost 80% report finding unauthorized or unverified people in areas they shouldn’t be, Envoy says in survey findings released Tuesday.
- The findings show a confidence gap between how well leaders think their systems can prevent unauthorized access and how effective their systems actually are, in part because of difficulty managing disparate systems, Envoy says.
Dive Insight:
Organizations have security controls in place, but those controls do not always operate as a continuous chain, Envoy says. “Identity may be verified in one system, authorization determined in another, access granted somewhere else, and presence recorded separately,” the occupancy analytics firm says in the report.
Disparate systems make it harder to answer who is in a building, what they are authorized to access and even whether they are onsite at the moment, Envoy says. This can make it difficult to manage safety and compliance, the workplace management company says.
Access control is particularly important in the hybrid work environment many organizations are operating in, says Haniel Lynn, CEO of Kastle Systems, which provides access control, video surveillance, visitor management controls and other security controls. “Think about any multi-tenant, multi-vendor or multi-building type of environment,” Lynn told Facilities Dive in an interview last month. “Whether it's access control, video, visitor management, identity monitoring and parking, there are all these different, disparate systems.”
“You are potentially looking at six or seven different security providers or vendors across all those different spaces, and what happens in that disjointed and fragmented approach is when anything potentially goes wrong,” Lynn said. “The lack of accountability makes it really hard for your average facilities manager … to figure it all out.”
While access control and security equipment manufacturers do provide help for end users to integrate their systems and troubleshoot, working through that process across all an organization’s disparate systems can be a challenge for operators, according to Greg Parker, vice president of lifecycle solutions in the Americas at Johnson Controls.
Integration is key because real-time visibility depends on it, which is what most building operators want, the Envoy survey shows.
“Taken together, the priorities are less about one missing tool than about connecting identity, authorization, presence, response, and evidence,” Envoy says.
That visibility challenge for organizations is driving security service providers — like Kastle, Johnson Controls and Envoy — to work on unifying these systems into one cohesive view for their customers, the executives said
“It’s difficult at times for some of our customers … to continue to manage their own services completely,” Parker said in an interview. “Mostly because it’s hard to find the right help. “So we are seeing more of a trend toward managed services.”
“[Facility managers] have too many things to worry about,” Lynn said. “In part because the people that they call don’t know exactly what’s going on, because they don’t own the entire equation. … A fragmented, disjointed system doesn’t always work.”
That fragmentation can lead building operators to believe they’re spending adequately on security, even while not knowing who’s in their buildings, the Envoy findings suggest.
