How is a useful “return on investment” (ROI) regarding managed security services for buildings and facilities truly measured? This managed security solutions industry briefing explores the ROI topic and provides references for further professional information and advice.
Achieving an environment of safe, secure and productive employees or guests is both the strategic and tactical imperative of all facility managers. Whether your location is in a difficult area of town to monitor, your building is spread among diverse landscape features, or your visitor and guest movements are extremely unpredictable; building security managers are constantly planning, reviewing, implementing, analyzing and modifying all elements of the building security context. It’s an extremely challenging, constant and sometimes failure-prone exercise – to completely secure and safeguard a building’s occupants and assets. That’s why many facility managers turn for help to professional managed security services providers, who offer time-tested, proven best practices and tools for a holistic security system management solution.
Much like an “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS) provider of computer technology and services offers to Internet businesses, managed security solutions for buildings and facilities offer a fully-vetted, tested and proven set of skills, methods and tools to completely mitigate all known facility security risks. Many building security risks may be known and unique to your own facility, but a national managed security services provider will also bring to bear thousands of “lessons learned” and risk avoidance experiences from their inventory of past or existing clients. This practice of leveraging a managed security service provider’s experience is increasingly common in the broad and complex discipline of building security management solutions, becoming as common as leveraging very experienced IT consultants for the scenarios they’ve tackled over hundred of clients with similar objectives.
As a prominent industry example, Kastle Systems Managed Security provides building and facility security managers a “Security as a Service” (SECaaS) capability – though not only as commonly defined by providing “security software system management and solutions as a service”, but also by providing “physical facility or building security management, skills, personnel expertise and training” as a service. In fact, many data centers actually do offer SECaaS that includes not only IT software and data protection, but also physical security design, technology and personnel protection as part of the facility itself. Kastle Systems provides security as a service through an extremely mature, proven and comprehensive set of managed security products and solutions specifically for buildings and facilities, including secure access control, video security, fire and life safety systems, intrusion detection and environmental control monitoring and reporting products.
A SECaaS approach to managing your building’s security plan and execution helps reduce and shift security-related risk and costs to an external provider, away from your internal staff and budget. Costs including personnel staffing, training, customized onsite systems and constant research and education for security policy and approach maturity are typically borne by your company or perhaps a standard property management firm (without adequate expertise in building security). A managed security services provider like Kastle Systems can design and operate a single facet of your security plan, or the entire scope of protective needs and objectives – whatever approach is most effective and mitigates the right scope of risk for your property.
Your return on investment (ROI) using an SECaaS approach for the critical elements of your building security management execution will be most quickly and easily measurable from a direct reduction in costs spent addressing out-of-date risks. Risks are typically measured by evaluating the “impact of loss” rating against the “vulnerability to threat” exposure, per given threat (i.e. natural, criminal, terrorist, accidental). Out-of-date risks are those that are no longer current (yet may still be monitored via expensive systems); for example the assets being protected have been fully depreciated or replaced (and are therefore no longer critical), or the threat being monitored is overcome by events (i.e. recent public construction has eliminated a flood or crowd access issue).
Managed building security ROI is also measured from a cost avoidance perspective – avoiding direct employee costs for constant retraining, keeping up with industry tools and developing new techniques for growing security threats. As well, the ROI will be expressed as an overall confidence, satisfaction and productivity factor experienced by your building managers, security staff, employees and visitors. This kind of “qualitative” ROI can be measured through employee or building occupant surveys or feedback, the overall improvement in building traffic and expected activity profiles, along with a decrease in security incidents and monitoring events.
For more information or guidance about how a managed building security system solution, implemented in a “Security as a Service” model, can comprehensively improve your facility, space or asset management ROI – contact a reputable, experienced national managed security services provider like Kastle Systems.
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