Amidst the ongoing public health emergency, business leaders are managing operations as best they can. Often overlooked, though, is the role of corporate security. Security threats are increasing, and teams must ramp up quick. What’s the first step to corporate security maturity?
Corporate security management has entered the digital age
Well, the industry has been disrupted by digitalization. But many corporate security outfits remain overwhelmingly manual.
In too many businesses, guards still track security incidents with pen, paper, and notepads. The incidents then get manually recorded in sprawling Excel spreadsheets.
What’s sacrificed in the process? Well, near misses get ignored, for one. Visibility into all incidents and an accessible audit trail also go by the wayside.
It’s a familiar scenario. Which means most security teams will have to start their corporate security maturity process somewhere.
First step to corporate security maturity: get a tool to help you collect information from across the organization
Why does digitalization matter for smaller organizations in low-density facilities, though? After all, business leaders are likely to push back, arguing that their organizations only experience a few, high-severity incidents.
The proper response is that some is not none.
Further, as risk increases, security teams must have the requisite functionality to track those incidents, even if the incidents themselves don’t require full-fledged investigations.
What will it take?
Arriving at this level of corporate security maturity entails access to digital operational security management technology. Such technology enables the capturing and documenting of all aspects of a given corporate security incident.
That’s not all.
Teams themselves will have to put a consolidated, streamlined process in place to ensure that incidents are reported – preferably via mobile-optimized software applications that empower all security personnel to report incidents (including near misses) as often as possible.
Other functionality to look out for include:
- Real-time analytics. Pre-configured analytics templates to communicate real time security insights to any stakeholder in the organization or the ability to build on best-practice templates to create your own.
- Automated reporting. Automated reports to be sent periodically to chosen stakeholders or best-practice templates built to your own specifications to meet unique requirements.
- Create and share custom reports. Custom reports easily created, driving better understanding of your operations.
Benefits of corporate security maturity
What’s the thinking, here?
The more incidents captured and reported serves to increase visibility and line of sight to senior leadership – the latter preferably facilitated via seamless notification processes.
That way higher ups will begin to appreciate the ROI of the corporate security operation.
Personnel decisions can then be more easily justified, with clear data that shows where, when, and how incidents are happening and how teams are responding to and investigating those incidents thoroughly – however rare.
Finally, the security threat is increasing across multiple domains – cyber, physical, supply chain, and cyber-physical. Large organizations with expansive physical operations aren’t the only targets. Attackers have learned that mid-sized and smaller businesses are just as vulnerable.
To mitigate the risks, security teams will have to ramp up, jumping up multiple levels of corporate security maturity. So, what are the next steps? Download our Corporate Security Maturity Checklist to find out.
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