Axis Security is proud to be an active supporter of The London Living Wage and in the main, the London clientele are willing to pay attractive rates. But, where pay increases within companies have recently ranged from 0% to 2%, it can often be a hard justification for buyers of security to award higher increases to supporting contractors.
Perhaps a more controversial issue regarding the shortage of staff relates to the licensing regime and ongoing training. The industry now has a huge pool of licensed individuals who we believe are simply not up to the high standards required of today’s security officer.
Within this climate, end users must critically examine their security budgets if we are to retain the good quality people within our industry and more importantly, attract other high calibre individuals to join. The time has surely come to spread our recruitment net far wider than just those who already hold a licence. This will result in an uplift in cost, but it may well be a price worth paying.
Facing up to the security challenges of 2017
SECURITY PROVIDERS’ VIEWS
Continuing our focus on 2017, we invited a range of senior representatives from security providers for their views on the challenges facing security in 2017
David Mundell MD Axis Security
Recruitment is a key issue Finding, training and then
retaining the best talent is what all businesses strive to achieve, but with unemployment at a ten-year low, the pond from which we can fish for new talent has become smaller.
Additionally, in many cases, the wages that are on offer for security personnel tend to compare unfavourably to less onerous or responsible tasks where the hourly rates are much higher.
6 © CI TY S ECURI TY MAGAZ INE – WINT ER 2016/ 17
Amanda McCloskey Sales and Marketing Director CIS
Human behaviours around new technology like camera phones will continue to be a challenge
Virtually everyone has a high quality camera phone and the most remarkable phenomenon for me is members of the public choosing to film serious incidents on their smartphone cameras instead of contacting the emergency services.
At a recent Griffin presentation for those working in Central London, a senior police professional recounted a fire incident at a New Look store in Oxford Street. A number of people had begun filming the incident but a significant amount of time passed before anyone actually alerted the emergency services, assuming that someone else would do it. We have to ask ourselves why people are doing this and how we can educate them to do the right thing.
Manipulation of video is another challenge in an age where editing software is accessible to everyone via free apps on smartphones. As ever, it is a game of catch up when it comes to detecting digital content fraud. Body Worn Cameras (BWCs) are an option to counteract this challenge, with reports that complaints against the police have dropped dramatically and research to suggest that behaviours improve with the awareness of being filmed. I do see BWCs being accepted and relied upon more and more, resulting in a safer security workplace.
Emma Shaw, MBA, CSyP, FSyl, FCMI Managing Director Esoteric
Increased criminal use of new technologies
Despite the benefits of innovation, it is the pace of evolution and the early adoption by consumers and businesses that continues to be the weakness utilised by criminals. In 2017 we expect to see increased criminal use of new technologies, combined with social engineering and traditional espionage techniques, to penetrate the weak points in rapidly evolving systems. As companies look to protect themselves against the cyber risk, we have seen the lack of investment in employee awareness – often leading to the insider threat, both purposeful and inadvertent. It would seem that no sector is immune from activities perpetrated by current or former employees. A proliferation of incidents start with phishing campaigns aiming to establish persistence on devices for later network infiltration. A resounding 55% of all reported incidents came via the insider threat, with 82% of those incidents resulting from social engineering.
Espionage throughout 2016 has made front page news with bugging in sports clubs, hacking WADA at the Olympics and espionage in a US oil company and we see the damage to reputation – causing loss in confidence and significant risk of financial loss. Such risks are predicted to increasingly threaten to derail business, becoming more challenging longer term as technology advances at an increasing pace. Private sector security companies will be ever more important in working with the commercial and public sector in mitigation and reporting of attacks.
Pierre Racz CEO Genetec
Smart Cities and Secure Cities – Balancing Safety and Privacy
In the 21st century, democracies are challenged to balance collective rights with individual rights: namely, safety and the rule of law on one hand, and privacy on the other. As it turns out, this is not a zero-sum game. Computing power has increased at such a rate that we can divert some CPU cycles previously gobbled up by the bandwidth requirements of the storage and the network and apply it towards privacy.
Privacy concerns can be addressed by the judicious use of encryption technology applied to personally identifying data to ensure that it cannot be propagated to other systems against publicaly sanctioned policies.
www. c i t y s e cu r i t yma g a z i ne . com
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