Creating a Highly Visual, Valuable, and Open Future for Security
Posted on Tue, Feb 16, 2010
By Ron Worman, The Sage Group
Security's Solutions are Valuable Accross the Enterprise? How?
Imagine having multiple locations throughout North America, perhaps the world. Somewhere in a corporate database there is a record of which employees are at each location. A security database may have records of those employees who have entered a building and exited. Another database will have an asset record for each building. External news feeds provide political, disaster and weather information. And all of this information is time-based and location-based.
But when something urgent happens, analyzing spreadsheets and surfing databases can be cumbersome, time consuming, and dangerous. After-all, lives and assets are at stake. So where can I get one single view that will bring this all together in one simple graphical interface?
Nathan Banks, Director of Business Development for IDV, would say ‘there is a map for that.' "90% of data that security uses is location-based", said Banks. "Most of that information is in Excel, Outlook or a database and can't be easily accessed at the time of need." IDV believes the answer is aggregation and visualization. "7% of the workforce understand an excel document. A common visualization platform is needed to acquire, view and quickly understand organizational information."
As well, a common theme of ‘The Great Conversation' is the opportunity for security to reach out beyond its traditional focus of risk mitigation to assist the organization with its strategic mission and goals. According to Banks, this is the opportunity and the challenge to the attendees and the hardware and software sponsors of the Security Summit.
"My challenge to the attendees is that the roadmap to 2020 demands that security understands the business and its customers", said Banks. "We must seek to understand the shared interests and cross-functional value of the tools we are using to the rest of the organization."
According to Banks, IDV's unique application, Visual Fusion, assists with this by empowering organizations to integrate enterprise information, web services, unmanaged work files into a single interactive picture and present it all within the context of location, time and other critical visualizations. A few examples include:
- A large coffee retailer that found the productivity of their stores might be impacted by weather or other external events. Assets and employee data were aggregated into a location-based view for all stores
- Fleet Service Application: 3 Different GPS feeds were aggregated into Visual Fusion resulting in a more intuitive view of vehicle status, but also reducing GPS vendor fees in the process
- Marketing: One marketing group worked with IDV Solutions to build a solution based on Visual Fusion and Bing Maps. The new application unites multiple data sources in an interactive map-based presentation. The result saves time, enables strategists and sales representatives to better focus their marketing efforts, and enhances communication with their channel partners.
- Global Security Operations Center: Microsoft aggregates company data and external news feeds with thousands of security cameras and card reader information, providing a unique view for security workers monitoring facilities around the world.
This is all possible because IDV is a strong proponent of open systems. To Banks, true open systems are not constrained by artificial barriers that some vendors use as an excuse to limit access and protect their markets. "APIs are a barrier", said Banks. "Companies must be able to reach into corporate databases, extract information that is needed, and create solutions."
Without this level of openness, systems will not be able to interoperate and address the needs of the future. "If you want them to work in 2020", said Banks, "organizations need to stop buying closed systems. You need to just say ‘No'.
IDV's Virtual Booth contains more on this and other security solutions.