Security devices - Expert commentary

There’s a new security paradigm emerging across malls, server farms, smart office buildings, and warehouses, and its advantage over the status quo are so broad they are impossible to ignore. Instead of a lecture, let’s start with a short narrative scenario to illustrate my point. Darryl's work Darryl works as a security guard at the Eastwood Mall. Like any typical evening, tonight’s shift begins at 9:30 PM, as the stores close and the crowds thin. His first task: Ensure that...

If defence is the best form of attack, then in security, planned preventative maintenance (PPM) is the best way to protect your business from harm. Also known as PPM, the service ensures that your security efforts are up-to-date and effective. In the latest how-to guide, discover the benefits of planned preventative maintenance and learn how to add PPM to your building. What is Planned Preventative Maintenance? You have installed all of the necessary security measures for your business, now wh...

Although the wider adoption of 5G, together with faster connection speeds and improved bandwidth, opens up new prospects for telecom service providers, it also poses new risks in terms of network security. This article explains how telcos can make their newly-established 5G networks as well as telecom software solutions more impenetrable and secure. Implement robust device authentication protocols 5G is set to spur a wide-scale adoption of connected devices in the business and consumer sphere...

The growing mobile ownership rate, the emergence of more user-friendly banking apps, the tech-native younger generation, and, of late, the pandemic-induced shift to online, all create a fertile ground for mobile banking. Unfortunately, the acceleration of banking app adoption today goes hand in hand with the increase of targeted security threats. In 2022, a month wouldn’t go by without a headline-making mobile banking attack or incident that resulted in stolen funds and sensitive personal...

Enable third-party application system quickly to incorporate the visual data, as part of their solutions. Each and every user has a unique set of platforms that they need to efficiently run their business. In the security and surveillance field, increasing interest in visual sensor networks drives the development of multi-camera applications in private and public areas. Thus, middleware is needed to facilitate video data sharing connections between software platforms. It works like video plumbi...

It’s clear that despite recent layoffs in the tech industry and general unease about the economy, there are still significant gaps in the number of jobs available and the amount of workers available to fill them. According to the Labour Department, there are 5.5 million more job openings than workers available. The physical security industry is not immune to these shortages. Last fall, Allied Universal reported being unable to fill thousands of open roles nationally while other smaller s...

The smartphone is an integral part of our daily routines. The communication and entertainment device of yesteryear has become a serious player with which we increasingly handle sensitive processes, such as payment transactions. BLE or NFC authentication At the supermarket checkout, more and more customers are pulling out their smartphones instead of their wallets. Apple Pay, Google Pay, or specific banking apps make it possible: to hold the smartphone in front of the reader of the checkout sys...

Although video camera technology has been around since the early 1900s, it was not until the 1980s that video started to gain traction for security and surveillance applications. The pictures generated by these initial black and white tube cameras were grainy at best, with early colour cameras providing a wonderful new source of visual data for better identification accuracy. But by today’s standards, these cameras produced images that were about as advanced as crayons and coloring books....

For the past few years, security professionals have had to change the way that they go about protecting their organisations. From challenging old assumptions around access control through to implementing more access management and authentication policies, security has been at the heart of how companies have responded to the pandemic. The journey to more modern security processes that could support more flexible working was a rapid one. Remote work programmes have bedded in, based on how IT sec...

Nowadays to save costs by making full use of old devices while upgrading the old security projects, many integrators or installers prefer to use video management software to manage multiple brands of video devices (such as IP cameras, and NVR), instead of only one single brand. So that they could have more flexible choices to earn profits while saving costs. Multi-brands video device management On other hand, with market segmentation and specialisation, instead of managing the video by themsel...

One of the biggest security trends in the last two years has been the adoption of cloud-based services, spearheaded mainly by an increasing number of video surveillance-as-a-service (VSaaS) offerings. VSaaS market value According to MarketsandMarkets Research, the global VSaaS market value is expected to reach $6.2 billion by 2026. This growth is propelled by demand for remote access video services, less local hardware to maintain, new internet-enabled devices, and a lower total cost of owners...

Enterprise security directors often count on an integration firm to handle jobs ranging from day-to-day activities to long-term, technology-laden projects. However, before entering a relationship, you must know what's reasonable to expect from an integrator – as not all are created equal. Here are some tips that might make the selection process easier. Completing comprehensive classwork An integrator's experience working in an enterprise environment is an obvious consideration. Ideally...

Organisations have shifted business focus countless times since the onset of the pandemic. While many leaders have been primarily concerned with the immediate health and safety of their customers and employees, 2022 has given rise to a new trend: More than ever, business leaders are seeking security solutions that increase operational efficiency and cost savings as well as improve logistics and business insight. As working environments become more complex, organisations looking to drive higher...

Back in 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis published a ground-breaking article in the Harvard Law review called ‘The Right to Privacy’. To this day, it is regarded as one of the most influential essays in the history of American law and is widely regarded as the first publication in the United States of America to advocate a right to privacy, articulating that right primarily as a ‘right to be let alone’. In this essay, the authors questioned whether the arrival of p...

Many people, quite correctly, point to Salesforce.com—which launched in February of 2000—as the first example of cloud computing. In the years following, the term ‘cloud’ became so popular and was applied to so many products and service offerings, that it became almost meaningless. The result was cloud confusion in the business world and in the media. In one stark example from 2008, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison described news stories about cloud as, ‘complete gibberis...

We must leverage existing technologies like social media monitoring, gunshot and weapons detection, and real-time watchlist alerting. We owe it to our children. The recent news of the Dallas elementary school shooting absolutely gutted me. It’s a tragic and incomprehensible loss of life. A question I hear being asked again and again – could technology have made a difference? From my experience, modern technologies can help schools mitigate some of the damage and provide an early w...

Currently and unfortunately, there is no such thing as Cloud Police. If there were, two-thirds or more of the companies using ‘cloud’ in their advertising and documentation would be in Cloud Jail for seriously misusing the word in their marketing. The term ‘Cloud’ is over-used and misused—sometimes intentionally and knowingly, but also often in ignorance. It’s just a word—but in the context of cloud computing technology, it does have a specific meaning...

Trevor Dearing, the EMEA Director of Critical Infrastructure Solutions at Illumio, said “It is encouraging to see NIST releasing updated guidance acknowledging the increase in cyber-attacks targeting the supply chain and the consequent necessity to bolster the supply chain’s cyber security. We can no longer turn a blind eye to the exponential increase in attacks on the IT systems of manufacturers, logistics companies and organisations, which ultimately target the operational part of...

Today, RFID readers can be found in numerous devices requiring user authentication, authorisation and access control, from doors to multi-function printers to point of sale terminals to computers and more. RFID is a simple, secure and convenient access control solution for end users and original equipment manufacturers. RFID readers/writers come with a broad range of form factors, capabilities and configurations. Choosing the right RFID reader When choosing a reader to embed into a system or d...

With increasing security and public health concerns, contactless credentials are gaining more and more importance. Contactless credentials can be divided into two main categories: soft credentials that include mobile phone applications that tap into their BLE/NFC hardware and transmit the data, and hard credentials that typically include low frequency (125 kHz) and high frequency (13.56MHz) based passive RFID transponders. With the help of these credentials, organisations can tackle safety conc...

In the era of the ‘Great Resignation’, it may seem counterintuitive to say that people will power business security in 2022. However, a convergence of challenges over the past few years has led to an undeniable trend in the security industry: With more technology comes the need for more people to monitor, analyse and leverage the data that technology produces. Always-on approach to security Since businesses were forced into lockdown two years ago, we’ve seen technology adopti...

Most individuals have strong opinions about what is more essential to our civilisation: personal privacy or security. After more than a decade of technology enabling greater and greater amounts of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and data harvesting, now the pendulum is swinging towards a society that places more emphasis on individual rights and privacies. This shift is manifesting in a variety of ways, quickly changing the technology, security and cyber security landscapes, and requi...

Software as a Service (SaaS) provides computer equipment, OS, and software customised to the user’s purposes as a service. Access control can work in the same way. If you work in the physical security industry, especially concerning access control, you have probably heard about the term ‘ACaaS’ recently. ACaaS is a combination of ‘access control’ and ‘SaaS’ (Software as a Service). From a semantic point of view, ACaaS means providing cloud-based access c...

Technology continues to transform the physical security industry, helping companies become more aware of the full spectrum of risks their organisation faces. Our new survey provides strong evidence that the use of these tools is solving some problems, but their implementation may create new challenges. In our 2022 State of Protective Intelligence Report, 93% of respondents said their company was actively adopting new threat intelligence, monitoring and alerting solutions for physical security,...

Most of the assumptions you’ve made about gunshot detection could be wrong. To those security professionals who stay on top of their homework, this is probably not true, but the ‘you’ in this context is directed to the collective security industry reader that, when looking into indoor gunshot detection products, sees terms like concussive force, percussion, or shockwave and wonders if these are important differentiators – or something the marketing department decided woul...

This is an era of digital revolution and with it comes dozens of new security dangers. Every gadget, from our smartphones to our security cameras, need some kind of protection from external hacking. However, how can we assure the safety of our devices, workplaces, etc.? Biometric security is one such security method that has emerged, since it is both efficient and perceived foolproof. It offers an additional layer of security for businesses and personal security systems. Biometric security syste...

Fingerprint biometrics is hugely relevant in the current landscape. Even amidst other newer developments, fingerprint authentication provides convenience and affordability. There are talks rife about how the coronavirus pandemic has changed the outlook towards fingerprint biometrics. What is currently the most used authentication technology is being speculated to be unsafe, when compared to other touchless biometrics and that its usage in the future would decrease significantly. However, the adv...

COVID-19 has undoubtedly impacted all industries, leaving its mark for years to come. Multiple lockdowns forced businesses across multiple sectors to reassess the way they worked, with many adapting to working from home due to the various stay-at-home orders. Data from a 2021 ONS survey revealed that 25.7 percent of the UK workforce, or 8.4 million people, worked from home during the pandemic, more than doubling the 2019 figure of 12.4 percent. A further nine million people were placed on furlo...

Business owners know the security of their properties is one of their most important daily concerns, and that leads many of them to work with professional security integrators who can design and deliver robust systems that provide protection and peace-of-mind through modern technologies and services. That’s why security integrators, by their very nature, have an invaluable tool that can be leveraged into bigger jobs: clients’ trust. As highly-trusted partners with extensive experien...

As we enter into 2022, there is still a level of uncertainty in place. It’s unclear what the future holds, as companies around the world still contend with the COVID-19 pandemic. Remote working has been encouraged by most organisations and the move to a hybrid working system has become ‘business as usual’, for the majority of businesses. Some have reduced their office space or done away with their locations altogether. Following best security practices With all this change in...