This is the 25th article in the “Real Words or Buzzwords?” series about how real words become empty words and stifle technology progress, also published on SecurityInfoWatch.com.
By Ray Bernard, PSP, CHS-III
We are now entering the era of smart buildings and facilities. We must design integrated security systems that are much smarter than those we have designed in the past.
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Real Words or Buzzwords?
The Award-Winning Article Series
#1 Proof of the buzzword that killed tech advances in the security industry—but not other industries.
#2 Next Generation (NextGen): A sure way to tell hype from reality.
#3 Customer Centric: Why all security industry companies aren't customer centric.
#4 Best of Breed: What it should mean to companies and their customers.
#5 Open: An openness scale to rate platforms and systems
#6 Network-friendly: It's much more than network connectivity.
#7 Mobile first: Not what it sounds like.
#8 Enterprise Class (Part One): To qualify as Enterprise Class system today is world's beyond what it was yesterday.
#9 Enterprise Class (Part Two): Enterprise Class must be more than just a top-level label.
#10 Enterprise Class (Part Three): Enterprise Class must be 21st century technology.
#11 Intuitive: It’s about time that we had a real-world testable definition for “intuitive”.
#12 State of the Art: A perspective for right-setting our own thinking about technologies.
#13 True Cloud (Part One): Fully evaluating cloud product offerings.
#14 True Cloud (Part Two): Examining the characteristics of 'native-cloud' applications.
#15 True Cloud (Part Three): Due diligence in testing cloud systems.
#16 IP-based, IP-enabled, IP-capable, or IP-connectable?: A perspective for right-setting our own thinking about technologies.
#17 Five Nines: Many people equate high availability with good user experience, yet many more factors are critically important.
#18 Robust: Words like “robust” must be followed by design specifics to be meaningful.
#19 Serverless Computing – Part 1: Why "serverless computing" is critical for some cloud offerings.
#20 Serverless Computing – Part 2: Why full virtualization is the future of cloud computing.
#21 Situational Awareness – Part 1: What products provide situational awareness?
#22 Situational Awareness – Part 2: Why system designs are incomplete without situational awareness?
#23 Situational Awareness – Part 3: How mobile devices change the situational awareness landscape?
#24 Situational Awareness – Part 4: Why situational awareness is a must for security system maintenance and acceptable uptime.
#25 Situational Awareness – Part 5: We are now entering the era of smart buildings and facilities. We must design integrated security systems that are much smarter than those we have designed in the past.
#26 Situational Awareness – Part 6: Developing modern day situational awareness solutions requires moving beyond 20th century thinking.
#27 Situational Awareness – Part 7: Modern day incident response deserves the help that modern technology can provide but doesn’t yet. Filling this void is one of the great security industry opportunities of our time.
#28 Unicity: Security solutions providers can spur innovation by envisioning how the Unicity concept can extend and strengthen physical access into real-time presence management.
#29 The API Economy: Why The API Economy will have a significant impact on the physical security industry moving forward.
#31 The Built Environment: In the 21st century, “the built environment” means so much more than it did just two decades ago.
#32 Hyper-Converged Infrastructure: Hyper-Converged Infrastructure has been a hot phrase in IT for several years, but do its promises hold true for the physical security industry?
#33 Software-Defined: Cloud-computing technology, with its many software-defined elements, is bringing self-scaling real-time performance capabilities to physical security system technology.
#34 High-Performance: How the right use of "high-performance" can accelerate the adoption of truly high-performing emerging technologies.
#35 Erasure Coding: Why RAID drive arrays don’t work anymore for video storage, and why Erasure Coding does.
#36 Presence Control: Anyone responsible for access control management or smart building experience must understand and apply presence control.
#37 Internet+: The Internet has evolved into much more than the information superhighway it was originally conceived to be.
#38 Digital Twin: Though few in physical security are familiar with the concept, it holds enormous potential for the industry.
#39 Fog Computing: Though commonly misunderstood, the concept of fog computing has become critically important to physical security systems.
#40 Scale - Part 1: Although many security-industry thought leaders have advocated that we should be “learning from IT,” there is still insufficient emphasis on learning about IT practices, especially for large-scale deployments.
#41 Scale - Part 2: Why the industry has yet to fully grasp what the ‘Internet of Things’ means for scaling physical security devices and systems.
#42 Cyberspace - Part 1: Thought to be an outdated term by some, understanding ‘Cyberspace’ and how it differs from ‘Cyber’ is paramount for security practitioners.
#43 Cyber-Physical Systems - Part 1: We must understand what it means that electronic physical security systems are cyber-physical systems.
#44 Cyberspace - Part 2: Thought to be an outdated term by some, understanding ‘Cyberspace’ and how it differs from ‘Cyber’ is paramount for security practitioners.
#45 Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning: Examining the differences in these technologies and their respective benefits for the security industry.
#46 VDI – Virtual Desktop Infrastructure: At first glance, VDI doesn’t seem to have much application to a SOC deployment. But a closer look reveals why it is actually of critical importance.
#47 Hybrid Cloud: The definition of hybrid cloud has evolved, and it’s important to understand the implications for physical security system deployments.
#48 Legacy: How you define ‘legacy technology’ may determine whether you get to update or replace critical systems.
#49 H.264 - Part 1: Examining the terms involved in camera stream configuration settings and why they are important.
#50 H.264 - Part 2: A look at the different H.264 video frame types and how they relate to intended uses of video.
#51 H.264 - Part 3: Once seen as just a marketing term, ‘smart codecs’ have revolutionized video compression.
#52 Presence Technologies: The proliferation of IoT sensors and devices, plus the current impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, have elevated the capabilities and the importance of presence technologies.
#53 Anonymization, Encryption and Governance: The exponential advance of information technologies requires an exponential advance in the application of data protection.
#54 Computer Vision: Why a good understanding of the computer vision concept is important for evaluating today’s security video analytics products.
#55 Exponential Technology Advancement: The next 10 years of security technology will bring more change than in the entire history of the industry to now.
#56 IoT and IoT Native: The next 10 years of security technology will bring more change than in the entire history of the industry to now.
#57 Cloud Native IoT: A continuing look at what it means to have a 'True Cloud' solution and its impact on today’s physical security technologies.
#58 Bluetooth vs. Bluetooth LE: The next 10 years of security technology will bring more change than in the entire history of the industry to now.
#59 LPWAN - Low-Power Wide Area Networks: Emerging IoT smart sensor devices and systems are finding high-ROI uses for building security and safety.
#60 Edge Computing and the Evolving Internet: Almost 15 billion personal mobile devices and over 22 billion IoT devices operating daily worldwide have shifted the Internet’s “center of gravity” from its core to its edge – with many implications for enterprise physical security deployments
#61 Attack Surface: (Published as a Convergence Q&A Column article)An attack surface is defined as the total number of all possible entry points for unauthorized access into any system.
#62 Autonomous Compute Infrastructure: We’re on the brink of a radical new approach to technology, driven by autonomous operations.
#63 Physical Security Watershed Moment: We have reached a juncture in physical security technology that is making most of our past thinking irrelevant.
#64 Access Chaos: For 50 years we have had to live with physical access control systems that were not manageable at any large scale.
#65 AI and Automatiom: Will engineering talent, business savvy and capital investment from outside the physical security industry bring technology startups that transform reactive security to proactive and preventive security operations?
#66 Interoperability: Over the next five years, the single greatest determinant of the extent to which existing security industry companies will thrive or die is interoperability.
#67 AI Model : One key factor affects the accuracy, speed and computational requirements of AI
#68 Interoperability – Part 2: There are two types of security system interoperability – both of which are important considerations in the design of security systems and the selection of security system products.
#69 Interoperability – Part 3: There are two types of security system interoperability – both of which are important considerations in the design of security systems and the selection of security system products.
#70 Operationalizing AI: AI is not a product, but a broad category of software that enables products and systems to do more than ever before possible. How do we put it to good use?
#71 Shallow IT Adoption – Part 1: It’s not just about being IT compliant, it’s also about leveraging IT capabilities to properly serve the needs and wants of today’s technologically savvy customers.
#72 E-waste – an important security system design issue: Now e-waste is an important design issue not just because of growing e-waste regulations, but because educated designers can save enterprise security system customers a lot of money.
#73 LRPoE - Long Reach Power over Ethernet: A dozen factors have improved the business attractiveness of network cameras, making it more desirable to place cameras further from existing IT closets than the 328 foot limitation of standard Ethernet cable.
#74 NIST Declares Physical Access Control Systems are OT: Does it really mean anything that OT has joined the parade of labels (IT, IoT, and then IIoT) variously getting applied to security systems?
#75 Future Ready: Google sees the term "future-ready" trending up across many subject domains. But does that term apply to the physical security industry and its customers?
#76 Data KLiteracy: AI needs data. Thus, the ability of any department or division in an organization (including security) to use AI effectively depends on its ability to effectively obtain and utilize data – including security.
#77 Security Intelligence (upcoming): AI brings two kinds of intelligence to physical security systems – people bring the third.
More to come about every other week.
Effective response is critical for many situations to prevent disastrous consequences. Nuclear reactor control systems, air traffic control systems, and jet fighter pilot displays are examples where situational awareness research and development work was focused initially, as discussed in earlier articles in this series.
Today, we live and work in a new information age frontier, with many artificial intelligence and big data tools emerging and being applied to great benefit in many areas of business. As I mentioned in a previous article, many of those efforts are aimed at providing situational awareness capabilities for fields of operation that are far beyond anything that has been done in the past.
This is possible because computing, electronic communications and data storage capabilities have been on an exponential growth curve for over five decades, to the point where what can be done with them both astonishes and overwhelms the human mind.
What will we do with these technologies in the physical security industry? If we do our jobs right, we will use such technology to provide operational support for incident, emergency, crisis and disaster recovery situations.
Organizational Resilience and Situational Awareness
Situational awareness is important for organizational resilience. Last year ASIS released an update to its resilience standards, combining and replacing two standards into a single standard, ANSI/ASIS ORM.1-2017 titled: Security and Resilience in Organizations and Their Supply Chains. Regarding situational awareness, the standard makes these statements, which are edited for inclusion in the bullet item list below, and come from pages xi and xii in the document’s Introduction section:
- Resilience in organizations is similar to resilience in people in that it is not a trait but rather a perspective of living with risk.
- Resilient organizations promote situational awareness and monitoring, with an emphasis on identifying indicators of change.
- Based on its risk assessment, the organization should consider layered controls which, among other things, promote organizational risk awareness and situational awareness.
Thus, we can see that for organizations, the scope of situational awareness is much larger than what we have considered before in the security industry. Part of that scope includes supporting coordinated response actions in incident, emergency, crisis and disaster recovery situations.
Risk Event Orders of Magnitude
In a brilliant paper published for download by TRUSYS, John B. Gargett, a retired organizational resilience (OR) consultant, introduced a methodology for managing organizational resilience, in support of emerging OR standards. The methodology is called R-SEC. The “R” stands for Risk. and the remaining letters “S”, “E” and “C” each represent levels of risk within an organization’s impact continuum. The “S” risks are those that are the most common and occur on a nearly daily basis. These daily incidents are almost always Safety and Security related. The “E” risks, Emergencies, occur less frequently, perhaps only once a year, but do result in moderate to significant impact. The “C” risks, Crises, occur with even less frequency but result in significant to catastrophic impact.
R-SEC views awareness of risks, threats and the potential for harm an enterprise faces as the responsibility of every individual with a stake in the enterprise, because it is their ability to respond to the results of organizational stress and impacts based upon their organizational responsibilities. Operational Excellence is achieved within R-SEC when the individuals, Teams, Techniques, Technologies, and Training, are working together in networked environments, preventing, preparing, responding, recovering and mitigating disruptive events in a continuous improvement cycle that is part of the business management process of the organization. Organizational Resilience can be achieved by using R-SEC as the management methodology.
Two very important aspects of the R-SEC approach are: (1) its recognition of the S-E-C levels of an organization’s risk impact continuum, which is an extremely helpful perspective for gauging the order of magnitude of response preparations, and (2) its focus on utilizing Teams, Techniques, Technologies and Training, which – in today’s organizations – occur in highly networked environments.
The R-SEC perspective provides a valuable context for designing and evaluating the use of situational awareness tools. I know this requires a bit of “thinking things through”, but if we don’t start thinking more widely and deeply about these things, our industry won’t be living up to the needs of its end-user customers.
Situational Awareness and Time
Most security and safety incident responses are handled routinely a nearly daily basis, and these are the situations that most electronic security system of today were intended to address, but don’t always fully live up to the task. From the Part 2 article in this series, I am repeating below the links to two charts that illustrate the difference between partial and full situational awareness.
For a hypothetical but realistic trespasser scenario, Chart 1 – the partial awareness chart – presents two scenarios likely to happen with the current capabilities of most security systems, depending upon the experience of the security officer on duty. Chart 2 presents a much better scenario of how events could unfold, given a security system providing full situational awareness. Take a few minutes to read these charts closely. (Note that C5SA stands for “Command, Control, Computing, Communications, Collaboration and Situational Awareness” – the capabilities that our security systems need to provide.)
Chart 1. Typical Security System – Partial Situational Awareness – Night Shift Scenarios
Chart 2. C5SA Security System – Full Situational Awareness – Night Shift Scenario
The security system capabilities depicted in Chart 2 are all achievable using today’s technologies – but they require a level of systems integration that most currently-deployed security products don’t make easy.
True situational awareness increases the effectiveness of and reduces the time required for incident response. Most security system designs are not based upon response scenarios that take the time factor into account throughout the entirety of the response period needed. There is much more to security system design than product selection. Good design involves understanding the operating needs and designing an integration of systems, including information systems, that will maximize the situational awareness capabilities of the people using the system for monitoring and response.
We are now entering the era of smart buildings and facilities. We must design integrated security systems that are much smarter than those we have designed in the past.
And we need to do more than deal with security and safety incident response only. We must use technology to strongly support the individuals and teams that respond to emergency and crisis events, and that includes the management of their ongoing response efforts for responses that require days or weeks of well-informed and well-coordinated response actions.
Questions as Response Unfolds
For example, what if you are responsible for evacuating a manufacturing plant because of a chemical spill inside the plant? Where are the visitors? Where are the people in wheelchairs or who otherwise may need assistance to evacuate? Where are the executives and VIPs? What are the safe areas to be used?
Indoor locating systems can provide the real-time location status for all personnel, but how can mangers and supervisors and personnel with special evacuation support duties be provided with location information that relates only to the specific personnel whose safety they are responsible for? This requires integration with security, HR, emergency response planning, systems, and facility environmental systems to provide real-time information about the tiered risk zones in the building. For example:
- High – deadly exposure
- Medium – exposure is time critical and must be managed
- Low – safe to breathe even though there may be strange odors or unusual temperatures
- Safe – no exposure danger or unusual environmental conditions
If you don’t have automated emergency systems that are specifically set up to support situational awareness and response in this kind of scenario, the concept of such risk zones becomes useless, as the situation can change more quickly than responders and evacuees can be informed of area status.
What is needed is an application that depicts such zones graphically on facility floor maps and keep them updated in real time, automatically pushing the maps out to the mobile devices of responders and evacuees including an icon to indicate their current location. This requires, for this example, a rules-based engine with analytics to process the chemical exposure levels in real time, using a database that contains exposure risk information.
Exposure time is critical information and should be tracked on a per-individual basis.
Role-Based Response Support
An application providing situational awareness would provide information about the unfolding incident to responding individuals according to their roles and responsibilities. Where are the appropriate chemical eye wash and body wash locations? As bottles of eye wash are used, do enough remain at each eye wash station? Should breathing masks or other air-purifying respiratory protective devices be distributed or rushed to any portion of the evacuating personnel? How and where should such contaminated equipment be disposed of? Are any of the safe areas for evacuating personnel nearing capacity?
A system supporting situational awareness should automatically answer these and a myriad of other questions, and keep presenting updated information to responders within the context of the current facility risk situation and the objectives of the emergency response plan being followed.
This hypothetical internal facility chemical spill incident provides only a small peek at the real-time information requirements of responders, and what “situational awareness” means in terms of roles and responsibilities, including real-time resource management.
Post-Incident Situational Awareness Data
Applications providing situational awareness for unfolding events and situations should record situation change points, decision points, and action points with the related response plan items as context, to provide reviewable and auditable data. This aspect of data management is critical for after-action evaluations and reports, and for all uses to which the incident data will be put in the future, including as a guide for realistic response exercises, and for strategy and policy evaluation. Additional situational awareness information can be highly useful after response actions are completed.
For example, some years ago a large global corporation experienced several facility fire events whose consequences were unacceptable. A close study of all facility fire evacuation incidents revealed that there were no negative impacts of consequence for those incidents whose facility fire wardens arrived in the facility’s main lobby meet firefighters within four minutes or less of the fire alarm evacuation.
Following the evaluation, the company established a policy and practice that facility fire wardens were to arrive in the lobby no later than four minutes after the fire alarm activation. As a result of putting that into practice, in the following decade no facility fire events had negative impacts of consequence – even those with similar fire and people dynamics to the earlier troubling events. This is an example of obtaining situational awareness after the fact and using that knowledge to improve future operations and results.
However, in a smart building era, a similar corporate situation could unfold differently. After the first fire incident with significant negative impact, the smart building’s own analysis would reveal and report that this was the first facility fire response in which the fire warden arrived later than four minutes to the mail lobby. Further human data analysis could verify that the firefighting effort and evacuation dynamics would have been better if certain key response actions had taken place just a few minutes earlier, starting with the earlier lobby arrival of the fire warden. Response plans and building smart information systems would be updated as a result, and the self-learning building systems would achieve a deeper level of insight into building fire response and evacuation management, as would the internal and external fire responders. It would not require a history of negative fire impacts to learn about the incident dynamics involved.
Situational Awareness in the Context of Incident Command
Our next and likely final article in this series on situational awareness will provide a close look at the information aspects of incident response as they relate to an incident command system structure. It will delve into how full response planning should take into account time-based response requirements as they apply to various roles and responsibilities of the senior incident management team personnel, and the various supervisors and team leaders they depend on.
We’ll look at the kind of action zone in which situational awareness tools can make a significant life or death difference to many individuals and change the magnitude of response effectiveness by making response time actions feasible in minutes instead of hours. We’ll use the Hospital Incident Command System as the response framework of reference.
Ray Bernard, PSP CHS-III, is the principal consultant for Ray Bernard Consulting Services (RBCS), a firm that provides security consulting services for public and private facilities (www.go-rbcs.com). He is the author of the Elsevier book Security Technology Convergence Insights available on Amazon. Mr. Bernard is a Subject Matter Expert Faculty of the Security Executive Council (SEC) and an active member of the ASIS International member councils for Physical Security and IT Security.