THE Enabler

Sep 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Michael Fickes

Access control and surveillance video

While Armbruster focuses most of his attention on business support services appropriate to security, he doesn't ignore the more traditional security concerns of access control and video surveillance. “We try to leverage security technology wherever we can,” he says. “But I'm not the technical expert on staff. That's Phil Mahoney.”

As security operations manager for NGIT, Phillip Mahoney helped Armbruster upgrade the sector's basic security technology.

According to Mahoney, Lenel Systems International Inc. of Rochester, N.Y., supplies the access control system management software. Irvine, Calif.-based HID Global supplies card readers.

Pelco, Clovis, Calif., provides the NGIT video surveillance system, which includes about 100 cameras on the sector's main campus, digital recorders and digital switchers. “We have connected this new digital system to our network,” Mahoney says. “We have a lot of MS-13 gangs around here, and we partner with local law enforcement agencies and the FBI to evaluate threat data from video surveillance and to protect our people. We have emergency call stations in the parking garages, and when a call comes in, it goes to our security center, where an officer tracks the person and dispatches help.

Another access control upgrade: FIPS 201

On Oct. 31 of last year, the federal government turned on a government-wide FIPS 201 system and began issuing smart cards to federal employees. The cards will enable federal employees to gain access to virtually any agency within the government without the need to provision and re-provision cards.

The federal government has also required its major vendors to adopt the FIPS 201 standard, so vendor personnel can visit government agency offices regularly without wrestling with visitor card systems.

Armbruster has begun the process of fitting out NGIT with FIPS cards. “The most important thing about this initiative is to get to one badge,” he says. “Right now, when we move from one Northrop Grumman facility to another, that doesn't happen. FIPS 201 cards will handle door access as well as logical access to our network. They will also enable us to use future technologies such as electronic signatures and biometrics.”

Clearances

As important as access control and video surveillance technology are, major government contractors such as Northrop Grumman deal with a host of other security problems. For example, NGIT personnel regularly visit government offices storing sensitive, classified information.

Before the government will permit anyone to visit these offices, he or she must obtain a security clearance from the government. For Armbruster, clearances represent an enabling problem. Without clearances, certain employees cannot do their jobs. More to the point, employees need to obtain clearances in a timely fashion at as low a cost as possible.

NGIT must process clearances on thousands of people every year. Processing involves collecting all of the information and completing all of the paperwork that the government needs to conduct the background investigations required to obtain clearances. It also means maintaining records that will allow efficient clearance updates, which must be carried out every five years and involve another background investigation.

“We used to process clearances in each of our offices around the world,” Armbruster says. “Over the past couple of years, we have consolidated the processing work into a shared service. We employ a staff of six people to handle this work. This has saved money and time. Because the six clearance experts know their job, they do it fast and they don't make mistakes. Right now, this staff supports 12,000 NGIT clearances.”

Indicative of the effectiveness of Armbruster's shared services clearance concept, Northrop Grumman plans to roll out the concept across all of the company's sectors, making a single small staff responsible for the clearances required by everyone in the entire 120,000-employee corporation.

Pandemic pandemonium

Most Fortune 100 corporations operate in hundreds of locations around the world and have been planning at the forefront of laying plans to sustain corporate businesses in the event of a pandemic caused, for instance, by a mutation in avian influenza or bird flu.

According to the World Health Organization, bird flu has reached Phase 3 of its development toward a potentially lethal pandemic disease. Phase 3 means that there has been bird to human transmission of the virus, but no human-to-human transmission.

If and when, one human transmits the virus to another human, the world will enter Phase 4 of the evolution of the virus. At that point, large corporations and large and small governments alike will have to be ready with a business continuity plan to deal with the appearance of the disease.

Armbruster has been running tabletop crisis management exercises to test and refine avian flu plans already laid out by NGIT. For one of those exercises, the scenario indicated that an airplane had just landed at LAX carrying a person with avian flu symptoms that apparently developed after contact with a person infected with avian flu in Asia.

To further complicate the problem, the scenario placed the security director and the crisis management director on an airplane for several hours where they couldn't be reached.

“We were looking for someone to step up and take charge,” Armbruster says. “That happened. Then the team organized a communications plan designed to keep people informed without causing mass panic. The communications team informed the executive staff.

“Next, the team considered alternate workplaces. People would not want to come to work. They might be sick, or they might want to stay home with their kids.

These were the kinds of things they thought about during the planning sessions. In the process, they found some holes in our plan and started to think about patches.”

From technology implementation through clearance strategies and planning for pandemic disease outbreaks, Armbruster is pushing his staff to raise its level of professionalism and to operate like a business that is marketing products and services instead of like a corporate police force cracking down on criminals. “We want to be looked at as a service organization,” Armbruster says. “Our goal is to apply the latest technologies whenever possible and to enable the business to get the job done. These are the things that we emphasize again and again, day-in and day-out.”

These are also the things that earned him the Security Director of the Year award for 2007.

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© 2008 Penton Media Inc.

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