Now & Future TECHNOLOGIES

Jan 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Ashley Roe & Stephanie Silk

           

Technology is coming at you faster than ever before. No surprise if you fall behind on modern innovations, or lose interest in the latest and greatest. Ever feel like the technology train has left the station and you're still in line waiting to buy a ticket?

As the new year begins, the staff of Access Control & Security Systems wants to help. This month, we take a look at the state of technology for the security end-user, calling on experts in the market to comment on what's new in technology, and what's coming next. We offer this technology overview with an eye toward how technology in various categories can help our readers do their jobs more effectively, and, as always, with an emphasis on how technology functions in the real world. Maybe we can demystifysome of the wizardry as we go along. We hope you find it helpful.

The latest: Situational awareness

Situational awareness, in general, is the ability to identify, process and comprehend critical elements of information about activities occurring in and around a specific entity. More simply, it is knowing what is going on around you.

In security, the specific entity is the organization, and those who benefit most from employing this concept are the security professionals tasked with protecting the organization's assets. The situational awareness software platforms on the market today integrate technologies such as cameras, alarms, sensors, video surveillance equipment, communications and access control devices together to make device activity visible to users from one point on the network. By having what is essentially a security system “dashboard” controller at your fingertips, security professionals can more quickly identify, manage and respond to security events taking place within the organization at any time and anywhere.

Although a range of situational awareness and situation management platforms line the marketplace, end-users are just now embarking on adoption of the technology, which is expected to grow over the next few years, says Rafi Bhonker, vice president of marketing and sales for Orsus, New York, developer of the Situator situation management platform. The system provides control room users with unified monitoring and interactive control of all connected technologies via a real-time 3-D Geographic Information System (GIS) interface.

“Users are still in the early adopter phase of situational awareness technology. They understand how it works, and they are prepared to step into it, but in terms of situation management, they are still learning,” Bhonker says. “They need to learn how to take advantage of the pre-planning benefit because there are limitless options in that regard.”

Bhonker says the first step in working with Situator — or any other situation management platform — is not simply plugging in various systems and waiting for an event to occur. The first step is planning. “The benefit of something like this is that you can sit back and dream and figure out what it is you really care about happening in your hospital or your school, for example,” he says. “You can think about it and figure out a response, put that plan into a book and refer to it. When that security event happens, you have already planned out a response.”

Dave Fowler, senior vice president of marketing and product development for VidSys, Marlborough, Mass., and Vienna, Va., says the situational awareness product trend is driving both public and private organizations toward cross-coordination. VidSys offers VidShield, an operations center management platform that integrates physical security devices.

“What we are seeing now is a drive toward shared coordination of activity. For example, in a number of cities, VidSys is working to enable first responders to get access to security systems used in private corporations,” Fowler says. With a dashboard view of the systems, first responders could use mobile devices to monitor system activity within the corporation and use the information to respond to emergencies more effectively. “Suppose there is a fire on the fifth floor of the building. Firefighters can use mobile devices to access installed cameras, get a real-time view of what's happening on the floor and coordinate a response across the organization,” he says.

Fowler says a possible explanation for users' hesitation to adopt the technology is that it is still being perfected in regard to security hardware integration. “With information security management on the IT side, you have a number of assets including databases, networks and other devices that you want to define in your security infrastructure,” Fowler says. “In doing the same thing with physical security devices, we are behind, and part of the reason is because it is a lot easier to integrate software than it is with hardware.” The new wave of integration, he says, involves enabling hardware and software to be plugged easily into the security management platform, so users can have a horizontal view of security systems.

The bottom line of the technology centers on giving end-users an outlet to develop more communication among those responsible for security and a clear view of events occurring within an organization at any given time. Users can expect to see the technology being implemented more frequently to boost security management and processes over the next few years.

As a side effect, Bhonker predicts that situational awareness technology will make the security department a more integral part of the organization's function. “The platforms not only enable security to be an integrated environment. They are also applications that can map into the business processes of an organization. Users can get an overall look at the organization's well-being and see how any situation can have an impact,” he says.

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This month in Access Control

• Targeting The Customer
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• One Hero Among Many
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• More from September's issue