Experts urge firms to take a unified approach to IT and building security management

Converging IT and building security will result in cost savings and efficiency gains, according to experts at a Forrester forum in Amsterdam

The barriers between IT and physical security are beginning to dissolve, bringing potential business benefits to organisations, according to experts at the Forrester security forum EMEA in Amsterdam.

Claudia Natanson, chief information security officer for drinks giant Diageo, argued that companies would be able to roll out technologies like identity management systems more cheaply and efficiently if IT and building security were put under a single management structure.

“Physical security is going – there’s no such thing anymore,” she argued. “When we are looking at the CCTV cameras in our massive warehouses, we need to be efficient, so it’s our duty to look at the things that can help the organisation achieve this…[like] security convergence.”

But she warned that integrating IT and physical access controls will only benefit businesses if they use the information generated by the converged system properly. “How many of us actually interrogate those logs generated by access controls?” she asked.

David Allin, director of planning, security and inventory at the European Patent Office, said during his keynote that reconciling “logical and physical security” is one of the biggest challenges he currently faces.