Dare to share your security successes

Sep 1, 2002 12:00 PM, Larry Anderson

Our mission here is to share information about best security practices and successful use of equipment with as many people as possible. In order to maximize our potential in doing so, we depend on our readers — your fellow security end-users — to share that information with us, and in turn, with you. We can't write stories unless we can find stories to tell, and more importantly, unless we can find users who are willing to tell them.

These are trying times for security professionals, who face both new levels of threats and heightened expectations by corporate management of their abilities to control the seemingly uncontrollable. It's easy these days for security professionals, and their corporate managers, to find reasons not to share their security stories with others. We have heard them all, believe me, including the following:

• It is our corporate policy not to endorse any supplier's product.

• It is our corporate policy to cooperate with the press only when there is a commercial benefit to our doing so.

• We consider our security practices as proprietary information — not to be shared with our competitors.

• We have to keep security close to our vest — we never know when a terrorist will start reading your magazine and we can't give anything away.

• If we told you about our security system, we would have to shoot you. (OK, so I haven't really heard that one — yet!)

It is ironic that the same people who clam up when we ask them for information about their security systems are the ones who read our magazine voraciously every month for information about what security systems everyone else is using.

One of our writers tells me he has seen a dramatic increase in the objections he hears from users he approaches to do interviews for our magazine. It makes getting the story that much harder.

Our outlook is that the harder it is to find stories to tell, the more important it is that we continue to tell them.

Sharing of information among industry peers is one of the most important ways that a security professional can learn and grow. Emulating other successful security departments is the best way any protection operation can develop and improve.

A year ago this month, dramatic events drew us together as a people, and emphasized to us the uplifting value of shared experiences. By sharing our professional experiences with each other, we make all of us stronger.

Let's not let ill-conceived corporate policies or misplaced paranoia get in our way. And if outside threats are allowed to take away our ability to share helpful information among ourselves, they will have in the process taken away one of our greatest sources of strength.

www.securitysolutions.com

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This month in Access Control

• Targeting The Customer
• Electronic Pedigrees
• One Hero Among Many
• Who? What? When? Where? Why?
• More from September's issue