Artificial intelligence (AI) - Expert commentary
With Black Friday on the horizon and shops and warehouses busier than ever, Elliot Roddy, Operations Director at CDX Security Group has shared some tips on how to keep the must-have gift items safe and secure: Regular monitoring and CCTV, Stock control and audits, and Partner with a trusted security firm. Staying alert with the must-have items Each year, we see certain items gain popularity and become the year's must-haves. This year, social media and the rise of TikTok have accel...
In the past five years, the retail landscape and the relationship between consumers and businesses has shifted drastically. It wasn’t too long ago when shopping at malls was considered a family activity and consumers shopped at local stores where they knew and interacted with sales personnel. Today, however, malls and interactions with employees are relics that accurately portray the way retail used to work. Retail companies have shifted their consumer model to focus on the online market...
In recent years, multinational corporations such as Cathay Pacific, Facebook, Uber, and numerous others have been heavily fined due to security and data protection violations. This period has seen data protection laws increase as more and more information is gathered and shared online. As such, it becomes crucial to account for security capabilities when choosing an embedded device that touches potentially sensitive data. RFID readers RFID readers very much belong to the ecosystem wherein per...
If defense is the best form of attack, then in security, planned preventative maintenance (PPM) is the best way to protect your business from harm. Also known as PPM, the service ensures that your security efforts are up-to-date and effective. In the latest how-to guide, discover the benefits of planned preventative maintenance and learn how to add PPM to your building. What is Planned Preventative Maintenance? You have installed all of the necessary security measures for your business, now wh...
Although the wider adoption of 5G, together with faster connection speeds and improved bandwidth, opens up new prospects for telecom service providers, it also poses new risks in terms of network security. This article explains how telcos can make their newly-established 5G networks as well as telecom software solutions more impenetrable and secure. Implement robust device authentication protocols 5G is set to spur a wide-scale adoption of connected devices in the business and consumer sphere...
The growing mobile ownership rate, the emergence of more user-friendly banking apps, the tech-native younger generation, and, of late, the pandemic-induced shift to online, all create a fertile ground for mobile banking. Unfortunately, the acceleration of banking app adoption today goes hand in hand with the increase of targeted security threats. In 2022, a month wouldn’t go by without a headline-making mobile banking attack or incident that resulted in stolen funds and sensitive personal...
It’s clear that despite recent layoffs in the tech industry and general unease about the economy, there are still significant gaps in the number of jobs available and the amount of workers available to fill them. According to the Labor Department, there are 5.5 million more job openings than workers available. The physical security industry is not immune to these shortages. Last fall, Allied Universal reported being unable to fill thousands of open roles nationally while other smaller se...
Although video camera technology has been around since the early 1900s, it was not until the 1980s that video started to gain traction for security and surveillance applications. The pictures generated by these initial black and white tube cameras were grainy at best, with early color cameras providing a wonderful new source of visual data for better identification accuracy. But by today’s standards, these cameras produced images that were about as advanced as crayons and coloring books....
Nowadays to save costs by making full use of old devices while upgrading the old security projects, many integrators or installers prefer to use video management software to manage multiple brands of video devices (such as IP cameras, and NVR), instead of only one single brand. So that they could have more flexible choices to earn profits while saving costs. Multi-brands video device management On other hand, with market segmentation and specialization, instead of managing the video by themsel...
One of the biggest security trends in the last two years has been the adoption of cloud-based services, spearheaded mainly by an increasing number of video surveillance-as-a-service (VSaaS) offerings. VSaaS market value According to MarketsandMarkets Research, the global VSaaS market value is expected to reach $6.2 billion by 2026. This growth is propelled by demand for remote access video services, less local hardware to maintain, new internet-enabled devices, and a lower total cost of owners...
Organizations have shifted business focus countless times since the onset of the pandemic. While many leaders have been primarily concerned with the immediate health and safety of their customers and employees, 2022 has given rise to a new trend: More than ever, business leaders are seeking security solutions that increase operational efficiency and cost savings as well as improve logistics and business insight. As working environments become more complex, organizations looking to drive higher...
Integrators need to be well versed in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), when discussing video surveillance options with their customers. Business leaders are looking for the best, most economical technology that will address their security needs, and they also want to avoid being blind-sided by unplanned technology operations and service costs. While most folks understand that the initial cost of a video surveillance system is not the same as the total cost of ownership, many might be surprised to...
Back in 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis published a ground-breaking article in the Harvard Law review called ‘The Right to Privacy’. To this day, it is regarded as one of the most influential essays in the history of American law and is widely regarded as the first publication in the United States of America to advocate a right to privacy, articulating that right primarily as a ‘right to be let alone’. In this essay, the authors questioned whether the arrival of p...
Trevor Dearing, the EMEA Director of Critical Infrastructure Solutions at Illumio, said “It is encouraging to see NIST releasing updated guidance acknowledging the increase in cyber-attacks targeting the supply chain and the consequent necessity to bolster the supply chain’s cyber security. We can no longer turn a blind eye to the exponential increase in attacks on the IT systems of manufacturers, logistics companies and organizations, which ultimately target the operational part of...
Today, RFID readers can be found in numerous devices requiring user authentication, authorization and access control, from doors to multi-function printers to point of sale terminals to computers and more. RFID is a simple, secure and convenient access control solution for end users and original equipment manufacturers. RFID readers/writers come with a broad range of form factors, capabilities and configurations. Choosing the right RFID reader When choosing a reader to embed into a system or d...
With increasing security and public health concerns, contactless credentials are gaining more and more importance. Contactless credentials can be divided into two main categories: soft credentials that include mobile phone applications that tap into their BLE/NFC hardware and transmit the data, and hard credentials that typically include low frequency (125 kHz) and high frequency (13.56MHz) based passive RFID transponders. With the help of these credentials, organizations can tackle safety conc...
In the era of the ‘Great Resignation’, it may seem counterintuitive to say that people will power business security in 2022. However, a convergence of challenges over the past few years has led to an undeniable trend in the security industry: With more technology comes the need for more people to monitor, analyze and leverage the data that technology produces. Always-on approach to security Since businesses were forced into lockdown two years ago, we’ve seen technology adopti...
Most individuals have strong opinions about what is more essential to our civilization: personal privacy or security. After more than a decade of technology enabling greater and greater amounts of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and data harvesting, now the pendulum is swinging towards a society that places more emphasis on individual rights and privacies. This shift is manifesting in a variety of ways, quickly changing the technology, security and cyber security landscapes, and requi...
Software as a Service (SaaS) provides computer equipment, OS, and software customized to the user’s purposes as a service. Access control can work in the same way. If you work in the physical security industry, especially concerning access control, you have probably heard about the term ‘ACaaS’ recently. ACaaS is a combination of ‘access control’ and ‘SaaS’ (Software as a Service). From a semantic point of view, ACaaS means providing cloud-based access c...
Access control for buildings is nothing new. Early forms of security access for business security systems were introduced in the 1960s, as business owners and managers looked for alternatives to keys, as a result of needing to frequently replace them, when there was a change in personnel. It’s only in recent years that the urgency to implement smarter, more efficient, and convenient forms of access control has increased, in the context of public and private sector digital transformation....
As a result of COVID-19, artificial intelligence (AI) has become table stakes for factories. Google’s 2021 Cloud Manufacturing Report found that 76% of manufacturing executives increased their adoption of disruptive technologies, including AI, during the pandemic. AI-based facial recognition technology AI has long been used in the sector to monitor the pace of work and anticipate machine failures, a trend that is expected to continue this year as factories look to optimize operations. Ho...
Corporate global security operations centers (GSOCs) bear the responsibility for protecting C-suite executives from physical and reputational harm amid social upheaval, extreme weather events, and escalating cyber threats. That mission, daunting as it is, becomes more difficult when GSOCs lack the data necessary for conducting a comprehensive threat assessment. Threat intelligence Unfortunately, many centers never move past basic threat intelligence which focuses on scenario-driven queries suc...
As we enter into 2022, there is still a level of uncertainty in place. It’s unclear what the future holds, as companies around the world still contend with the COVID-19 pandemic. Remote working has been encouraged by most organizations and the move to a hybrid working system has become ‘business as usual’, for the majority of businesses. Some have reduced their office space or done away with their locations altogether. Following best security practices With all this change in...
They say nothing stays the same for long, and this has never been truer than in today’s world of technology and innovation. The 21st century has seen rapid changes and every day brings a new update in one of the many segments of technology. Technology is evolving at such a rapid rate, due to a phenomenon dubbed accelerating change. Each new improvement is now a stepping stone, enabling stronger and better generations of technology, at faster speeds. Accelerating change evolving across all...
In the field of access control, face recognition has come a long way. Once considered too slow to authenticate people's identities and credentials in high traffic conditions, face recognition technology has evolved to become one of the quickest, most effective access control identity authentication solutions across all industries. Advancements in artificial intelligence and advanced neural network (ANN) technology from industry leaders like Intel have improved the accuracy and efficiency of fa...
Gregor Schlechtriem has worked in the access control market for over 20 years and is now responsible for the Access & Intrusion Business Unit at Bosch Building Technologies. In this interview, the expert talks about key industry trends, the impact of the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic, technical innovations and his company’s strategy. Mr. Schlechtriem, you have many years of experience in the security technology market. What is your background and what are your responsibilities as Se...
How AI and humans can work together is a longstanding debate. As society progresses technologically, there’s always the worry of robots taking over jobs. Self-checkout tills, automated factory machines, and video analytics are all improving efficiency and productivity, but they can still work in tandem with humans, and in most cases, they need to. Video analytics in particular is one impressively intelligent piece of technology that security guards can utilize. How can video analytics he...
The COVID-19 pandemic is only accelerating the expansion of Automation, Robotics, Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and changing how people live their daily lives. This expansion leads the way with technologies that are developed to solve problems, improve operations, streamline processes and assist people, to focus on learning new skills, creativity, and imagination. Transformation of the physical security industry One of the latest industries to be permanently transform...
Recently, the European Parliament called for a ban on police use of facial recognition. In the US, too, some cities have restricted police use of facial recognition. The first question that comes to mind is - why ban police from using technology that is allowed to private companies? Point of difference The key difference between the way police use facial recognition and the way commercial facial recognition products work is that: The police get a picture of a suspect from a crime scene and wan...
Today’s organizations face numerous diverse threats to their people, places and property, sometimes simultaneously. Security leaders now know all too well how a pandemic can cripple a company’s ability to produce goods and services, or force production facilities to shut down, disrupting business continuity. For example, a category three hurricane barreling towards the Gulf of Mexico could disable the supplier’s facilities, disrupt the supply chain and put unexpected pressure o...
