Survey: Managing risk becoming a greater priority for the C-suite
Risk assessment and management is becoming a greater priority for senior level executives in both the public and private sectors, according to VidSys’ fourth annual National Security Survey. In fact, 20 percent of respondents to the 2013 edition of the survey, which included responses from over 200 IT and physical security executives, said that reducing risk to their organization was responsible for driving security plans within their respective businesses over the next 12 to 18 months. More than 30 percent indicated that they plan to invest in risk management technology over that same time period.
In addition, 54 percent of survey respondents said that risk management in their organizations is a higher priority now than it was 12 to 18 months ago. More than 35 percent reported that their executive leadership team viewed risk management as critical to their business and 26 percent said they directly aligned it with their business strategy, which is up from 25 percent and 15 percent respectively in last year’s survey.
“There has been an increased focus not just on security, but on risk,” James Chong, founder and chief technology officer for VidSys said during a webinar covering the survey’s findings last month. “The overall landscape remains similar to past years, but there has been increased interest in the risk element.”
Of course, one of the ways that organizations are looking to mitigate their risks is through the implementation of new security technologies. More than 60 percent of respondents said that they planned to invest in risk management or physical security information management (PSIM) solutions in the next 12 to 18 months, which is up from 56 percent four years ago. Organizations are also increasingly turning to video analytics and video management software, with 28 percent and 42 percent respectively of respondents saying they had plans to adopt this technology over the same time period.
An overwhelming majority of survey respondents also agreed that being able to tie together physical security systems into a single, common operating picture was crucial, with 19 percent saying that it was “extremely important” and 54 percent saying that it was “important.”
Based on the survey data, Chong said that PSIM will play a vital role in helping organizations integrate all of these systems together.
“The level of support for integrated security is increasing. People understand without integration there cannot be interoperability and without interoperability there is no way to have coordination between multiple (agencies or organizations),” added Chong.
Chong said that one of the big misnomers within the industry is that PSIM is only applicable to high-end applications, which is not the case.
“The PSIM market has been maturing over the past several years,” he said. “When people want to roll out a global security initiative, it doesn’t mean you need to have multiple, disparate systems for PSIM to be a good solution. What we are seeing is that the right time (to implement PSIM) is really earlier in the lifecycle rather than later.”
The biggest factor still prohibiting many businesses and government agencies from adopting PSIM or other security technologies for that matter, however, remains budget constraints. According to the survey, 46 percent of respondents said that insufficient budget was the primary obstacle to moving their security department forward in the next year to 18 months. With that being said, however, this was first time in the survey’s history that this figure has actually declined.
