What can the world of Security learn from the Covid experience? The Courage to Innovate, Digital Transformation and the value of Resilience.

We have lived through difficult days and certainly others we will have to face. These months, as well as on our soul, will also leave an indelible mark on the history of society and the economy: the world of “after Covid” will still be different, as will society.
As operators in the world of security we can ask ourselves what we can learn from this experience and, in fact, I would like to share reflections on this with security colleagues.
The first value that I think we must learn from this experience is undoubtedly the Courage to Innovate.

The world of “after covid” will undoubtedly be different and the models used previously will have to be modified and innovated. An event such as the one experienced is a very strong incentive to introduce those innovations long thought but never really adopted in the management of security processes. We will be called upon to create more efficient management models. In these areas we will be able to refer to known concepts in the field of industrial production and borrow a “Lean Security”, or a revision of the way of doing security by aiming at essential processes, organized by priority / importance, efficient, automated and re-engineered from the very beginning.

Moreover, the moment is favorable to introducing all those “structural innovations” in the way we manage safety and in particular how we use technology to increase efficiency and effectiveness.

I think technology is the second great lesson learned. In our daily experience, technology has shown us that things that we thought could not be done (smart working, remote lessons, online shopping), overcoming a thousand difficulties due to lack of preparation and incomplete maturity, have come into play strength in our life, demonstrating that a different model is possible and that in some ways it has unexpected potential. Therefore, the Digital Transformation will accelerate in all areas of the organizations.

The world of security must and will be able to go through this transformation by increasing the use of digital technologies in the process of protecting corporate assets, or by digitally rethinking parts of the process previously performed in a “manual” manner or with the use of “physical supervision”. It is a non-trivial trend to interpret, since, mind you, it is not simply a matter of inserting technologies that allow us to make security as we are doing now or replacing parts of physical protection or “human” activities with technology.

Instead, it will be necessary to rethink the entire process, starting with the assets to be protected, the risks that can attack them, to arrive at the processes to be followed and the technologies to be used.

In short, an all-round transformation.
Finally, the third consideration that I feel like making, concerns the Value of Resilience.

During this time, aside from the difficulties inherent in the pandemic, many organizations and processes have stalled because they were not inherently resilient. Therefore, the lack of even one of the elements was sufficient to invalidate the entire result. Other organizations or processes have managed to deliver performances above all expectations, simply because they were inherently designed in a resilient manner and adapted well to the new situation. Communication networks are a good example. Despite being heavily stressed by non-ordinary conditions, they responded with an unexpected performance. The same is true for security.

Organizations structured to be able to manage in a structured, integrated, digital and remote way the monitoring processes, identification of threats and coordination of reactions have managed to guarantee their effectiveness. And resilience must be designed in the first place.
These concepts that seem abstract and far from the world of security will instead be very present in the future of us operators in this sector and will translate into the development of new Security processes and new technological solutions that support them, in the adoption of Platforms and Supervisory Systems Very effective integrated technologies of AI – Artificial Intelligence, in the use of IoT – Internet of Things – concepts applied to security, as well as in the design of technologies and processes that are resilient to external events (such as Covid) but also with respect to sudden changes in risk scenarios.
After all, a new challenge that will make our work complex but exciting!

Taken from securindex.com