Physical-Logical Convergence

According to a story in CSO Magazine, a former auditor at a major water service company used his electronic key card which was still active following his separation from the company, to get into secured facilities and wire out $9 Million dollars to himself before being discovered. Most enterprises have their physical security and IT security functions managed in different organizations. Businesses are waking up to the fact that physical access to critical facilities can be a threat source and additional risks lie hidden between these silos of operation. For asset-intensive industries like utilities, nuclear energy, oil and gas, chemicals manufacturing, transportation, etc., the stakes are even higher. Not only is it imperative to determine who has physical access to critical assets, it is equally important to monitor access to the control systems to avoid malicious and unintentional incidents with huge consequences.

PACS Integration
AlertEnterprise delivers a unified solution that incorporates IT access, physical security and access to critical assets to ascertain risk across multiple applications. It even extends across multi‐vendor environments delivering the most complete view of threats and vulnerabilities to determine the most complete risk posture. AlertEnterprise delivers seamless integration with leading Physical Access Control Systems (PACS) vendors like GE, Lenel, Tyco, Honeywell and many more. Support for electronic badge access systems, proximity sensors, smart cards, HSPD-12 and many other forms of access control allow for real-time correlation of blended threats.

• Integrate across multi-vendor PACS systems
• Correlate IT and Physical Access events
• Intelligent Provisioning based on risk analysis

Video Surveillance and Sensors
Convergence across various forms of security – physical access, video surveillance, alarm controls and imaging sensors are delivering additional value. Being able to correlate IT application events with physical access delivers significant incremental value. Having video verification of alarms and events is extremely useful in verifying incidents and quickly initiating remediation steps. Almost as important is eliminating false positives and reducing the cost of responding to unverified false incident reports.

The proliferation of IP-based digital video cameras as well as other imaging sensors such as biometrics, explosives detection and x-ray devices makes the integration with IT systems more likely. The ability to include live video feeds to augment other forms of security information contributes to the richness and accuracy of the response.

• Integrate with IP-based surveillance cameras and control software
• Augment badge access control with video verification of alarms and events
• Video verification of personnel in control rooms and critical areas
• Integrate with other sensor systems like biometrics and container imaging

Situational Awareness
Situational awareness is the process of recognizing a threat at an early stage and taking measures to avoid it. This was first a concept that was used by government and intelligence personnel, however the concept now is widely adopted by operators of critical infrastructure environments such as utilities, chemicals, transportation etc.,

Situational managers need information on time, location and other parameters relevant to evolving threats. AlertEnterprise can aggregate events, alerts, geo-spatial mapping information and locational intelligence in a single unifying application and combine it with video surveillance information as well allowing situation managers to respond rapidly while mitigating the adverse business impact from events as they unfold.

• Integration with Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth
• Automated guidance via Remedial Action Scripts (RAS)
• Data feeds from security automation tools as well as video surveillance