by Mike Webster, CPP
Over the past 20 years, physical security systems have evolved from hardware and software components to a comprehensive professional, functional, and technological domain. This requires specialized knowledge and subject matter expertise to design and specify security solutions.
The most recent and significant development in integrated security systems is physical security information management (PSIM)––a software and professional services solution requiring a non-traditional approach to specification, design, and deployment for architects, engineers, consultants, and security professionals. Until now, it has rested on designers and specifiers of integrated security systems to hold this knowledge.
A brief history of security
For many years, it was fairly easy for architectural and engineering firms to incorporate security systems into a set of project specifications. Access control, closed-circuit television (CCTV) video,and intrusion alarms were all largely standalone, hardwired, analog systems that did not require much integration or coordination with other design elements or team members. Over time, the security industry and technologies involved matured and developed.
Protecting assets within an organization became vital to each one’s mission and bottom line, spreading the concept of ‘security.’ This required collaboration, including information-sharing, with other departments, business systems, and databases within the organization.
While information-sharing and systems integration have progressed, the industry remains largely underdeveloped in this area. Historically, most hardware, software, and technology manufacturers have created closed, proprietary products to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace, and to prevent competitors from infringing on their market share. As a result, the security industry continues to be fractured and fragmented. Individual subsystems––including access control, video surveillance, and alarm systems––have limited interaction, and critical security information is kept in separate silos.
Fragmented security management, monitoring, command and control environments, and architecture have left security operation center personnel and management with many challenges, such as:
- inability to integrate disparate security systems for information-sharing and automation of system responses to alarm and event activity;
- need for users to maintain operable knowledge of numerous different systems; and
- lack of enterprise system functionality, and the subsequent forcing localized and regionalized deployments.
As systems integration evolves in other areas of the built environment, a better common operating platform is needed, allowing all facility security systems to be monitored with information-sharing for improved situational awareness and a more effective response to incidents.
As security systems and technology become more software-driven and move toward network-based communications, new opportunities for integration and information-sharing are being created. Along with this progression, the old, entrenched distinctions between access control, video surveillance, alarms, and reporting have blurred and, in some cases, disappeared. These disparate systems are replaced with a more holistic approach to security management, where a unified user-interface platform can be established to combine all functions and data. The security industry has finally responded to this need with the development of PSIM.
