AGILENT THINKS GLOBALLY ACTS LOCALLY

Nov 1, 2002 12:00 PM, by Kate Henry

Agilent Technologies is a modern company formed to serve the needs of a modern world. Spun-off from Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 1999, the multi-billion-dollar start-up is still going strong today. Based in Palo Alto, Calif., Agilent has 37,000 employees in 40 countries delivering product and technology solutions to the communications and life sciences industries. It is a daunting challenge to ensure the physical security of employees and assets ranging from research findings to measurement and monitoring devices, semiconductor products and chemical analysis tools. To do so in a broad geography is a further challenge — well met by a security operation with synergistic worldwide reach.

EFFECTIVE PARTNERSHIPS

Physical asset protection manager Larry Barasch has been with Agilent from the beginning. A former security manager for HP, Barasch describes the move to Agilent as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: “It was a very exciting time,” he recalls. “They were calling it an $8 billion start-up company and really figuring out how to cleave the company. HP had offices and facilities all over the world, and I was part of a very small team brought over to serve the global security function and to get it off the ground in only a few months. In the very beginning, we focused on putting together some “day one” guidelines and from there wrote our own standards and policies, taking what we thought worked well from HP and where we thought Agilent would go as a company.

“The logistics of managing the split were a challenge for a long time, and even today, we are co-located with HP in a few facilities,” Barasch continues.

Initially, the team's focus was on making quick, intelligent decisions while building a foundation for the future. “Our first director of security's vision was to rely on strong partnerships to augment our needs, and that has enabled us to maintain a more stable security organization,” Barasch explains. The company, for example, developed an electronic security systems strategic plan with a consultant, and Barasch says that those decisions are still serving the company today.

Barasch says Agilent's greatest risk is its intellectual property — the company spends more than $1 billion per year on research, and the results from Agilent's labs can be invaluable. “We spend a lot of time partnering with the IT security and risk management organization to help manage the intellectual property,” Barasch explains. “We do joint risk assessments, for instance, and may bring in someone from environmental health and safety. We have a lot of chemical manufacturing in our facilities, and especially now being more aware of potential terrorist attacks, we work with these partners to take a very broad view of the risk.”

He adds that a company population of salespeople and engineers traveling all over the world — carrying company information with them on their laptops — exacerbates that risk. “That's probably the thing that keeps most of us up at night,” he says.

Given traveling laptops, research laboratories, clean rooms, manufacturing facilities with dangerous chemicals and hundreds of office spaces, the scope of Barasch's work is broad, but the security function worldwide is largely seamless.

“When we came to Agilent, we had the opportunity to organize ourselves as a vertical function with security reporting to security all the way to the top, and that allowed us to standardize processes,” he explains. “We're now organized according to global and geographic functions, with three program managers with global oversight and three managers who oversee large geographic regions. There also are security managers in some of the larger countries and sites, reporting to our director of security.”

In addition to Barasch, who serves as the physical asset protection manager, Agilent also relies on a human asset protection manager for travel and employee security, and an information protection and security awareness manager to work with IT and communications personnel on security awareness programs. “A lot of the awareness messages are basic from a security practitioner's standpoint, but it's critical that employees understand security is their responsibility too,” Barasch says. “We've really trimmed down and become more effective and efficient.”

SAVVY SOLUTIONS

Much of Agilent's security effectiveness and efficiency is born of smart systems solutions that were implemented early on and have since been improved.

“A great thing about Agilent is that things are always changing,” Barasch says. “We're a high-growth company, so we're buying new businesses and divesting from others at a constant pace. Our goal as a global security organization is to look for the opportunities where we can be consistent with our systems. But we don't want to force migrations, and we also need to be cost-conscious in these economic times,” he says.

Barasch says a key result of Agilent's initial security plan was to implement enterprise-level access control systems with regional reach capable of interfacing with company databases such as human resources to reduce data redundancies and maintenance. “That type of interface means the minute someone leaves the company, all their access privileges are automatically turned off,” he explains.

Early on, Agilent chose Lenel Systems International Inc.'s OnGuard system for interior and exterior access control, photo ID and badging and alarm monitoring. Barasch says that different versions of the system currently exist in more than 60 percent of Agilent locations. The system offers flexible hardware and user capacity — from a two-door configuration to a 2,000-door, worldwide, enterprise-level system, for example.

“Agilent has standardized broadly on Lenel solutions, which gives the company a large scope of security capabilities — from auditing to investigations,” says Elena Prokupets, president of Lenel.

And in the case of acquisitions and divestitures, the system is equally useful. “When Agilent was first formed, we had a medical products line, which was sold,” Barasch says. “With several thousand employees leaving, turning off access privileges would have been a complex task, but with the HR interface it happened automatically and was simple.”

Barasch says another sound decision was to integrate Integral Technologies digital recorders with the access systems.

“One of the great things about today's security technology,” Barasch says, “is that having the access system and the digital recorders on the company network has really enabled us to design our offices differently. Previously, systems would have had to be tied to a local monitoring station and we'd need someone on site to change tapes and review video. Now, any remote manager can log in to the system to view stored or live video — I can call up a recording from Denmark right now — and on a per-office basis, it's been a significant cost savings. We did 40 or 50 offices in 2001 in the U.S. alone, and we saved more than $1.5 million,” he says.

Agilent has also put its own spin on the monitoring center concept: outside of its traditional security command centers, it has a security response center that can access video and handle incidents at any time worldwide. “The center is purely dedicated to handling incidents,” Barasch explains. “So, for instance, on Sept. 11, the center did everything from track where employees were to helping people who couldn't get on planes. Another example was when, in our Melbourne, Fla., office, the governor was set to visit and his security team found a suspicious box in the receiving office. Within minutes of getting the call, our security response center got the package up on video and worked with the local security manager and the governor's team to handle the situation.”

SMART GROWTH

Although Agilent's security and daily operations are both dynamic and high-tech-oriented, Barasch notes it's important to be unafraid of going slow. “The potential investments in these systems can be so large, it's important to understand what you really need and to take it one step at a time,” he says.

Agilent's next innovation on the security horizon, for example, may be a move to smart card technology, but caution is the word of the day.

“Going forward, we'll be investigating how to integrate all our systems even more tightly within the company's infrastructure,” Barasch says. “The smart card technology may fit. We're working with IT now to evaluate its use within the company, and IT is very excited about the potential for authentication of computer systems use — a keyboard with a slot for user verification, for example. And another benefit would be that if that card were also your ID and access card, you'd report losing it right away, because you wouldn't be able to do anything otherwise,” he adds.

FOR THE RECORD

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kate Henry is an Annapolis, Md.-based wirter and regular contributor to Access Control & Security Systems

ABOUT THE COMPANIES

For information, please circle the appropriate Reader Service number (listed below) on one of the Reader Service cards in the issue or visit www.securitysolutions.com.

Integral Technologies	20
Lenel Systems Intl. Inc.	21

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