Enterprises in the midst of digital transformation are finding that physical security and its convergence with cyber and information security requires that they consider new approaches to risk management, according to a panel of industry leaders at today’s Cyber: Secured Forum in Dallas.
The panelists represented an array of industries from companies such as Southern Methodist University, Glasswing Ventures, McAfee, Comcast Cable and Booking Holdings, all sharing “A View from the CISO’s Office.”
Concerns range from active shooters and the physical safety of students to how to secure the critical data sources that more and more employees within the organization are accessing.
The challenge with cybersecurity in some organizations is that they have to sell cyber within the organization because of existing cultures, but integrating and blending IT and physical security has the potential to bring everything together in a single pane of glass, said Mark Weatherford, global information security strategist at Booking Holdings.
Technology can solve some of the physical and IT integration issues, including those related to the provisioning and de-provisioning of employees. The pace of innovation is accelerating, and the longer you put off a focus on cybersecurity, the greater the challenge will be when you finally address it, according to the panelists.
Security orchestration is an issue that is improving, according to the panelists, which helps organizations manage and identify in order to mitigate risk. In the IT culture, there’s long been a habit of getting rid of products that don’t work, which hasn’t always been the case in the physical security world. “They don’t integrate as fast,” Weatherford said. “In the physical security world it’s been a different culture with respect to buying things.”
The panelists speculated on how convergence and integration will continue to play out over the next several years, and one panelist said there is a great opportunity for physical security companies to acquire cybersecurity providers in order to converge capabilities. The very definition of physical devices is changing, which has created a lot of opportunity for the physical feature set moving forward, one panelist noted.