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The globality of integrated solutions

The security industry is big on integration at the moment. If some of the people in the know were to be believed, you would think this is a new concept just invented. Of course integration has been around for many years, but the security industry of the past was comfortable in delivering proprietary solutions for specific problems that made good money. Integrators also benefitted from this deal as they were also able to make good money by knowing how to make diverse products talk to each other.

Today things have changed and more companies are either adopting open systems (some only partially to try to ensure they still have some kind of hold over customers), and buying or developing complementary products that expand the scope of their offerings – one of the expected trends this year is integrating surveillance and access control.

The reasoning for integration is simple. You get better results from a solution that incorpor-ates multiple aspects of security than trying to manage each aspect individually. The individual approach is good for job creation as you need people in each area that understand what needs to be done, but integration combines jobs. You may need someone with more skills, but that individual can replace more low-skilled individuals.

Interestingly, the World Economic Forum’s ‘Global Risks 2014’ report also talks about integration – I make the connection loosely. The 2014 report notes how global risks are “not only interconnected but also have systemic impacts. To manage global risks effectively and build resilience to their impacts, better efforts are needed to understand, measure and foresee the evolution of interdependencies between risks, supplementing traditional risk-management tools with new concepts designed for uncertain environments.” You can find the report at www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GlobalRisks_Report_2014.pdf.

On the global scale, where the report highlights issues such as financial crises in key economies, structurally high unemployment/underemployment, water and food crises, and income disparity among its top 10 global risks of most concern in 2014, it notes that risks are interconnected and the world needs to understand these interdependencies and extend the risk management tools relied on in the past to deal with them.

As the world becomes more complex, it’s not only the security industry that needs integrated solutions to mitigate the risks it faces.

In a short column, one can’t do justice to a report of this nature. Suffice it to say it is definitely worth reading. To end this column, however, as South Africa emerges from another election season, I thought it may be worth adding this quote from the report: “The risks perceived to be most interconnected with other risks are macroeconomic – fiscal crises, and structural unemployment and underemployment – with strong links between this macroeconomic risk nexus and social issues, such as rising income inequality and political and social instability.”

The fact is, with South Africa’s economy performing as it is and very little being done at a government level to improve it, the people of this country are going to have to deal with a 'lost generation' of unemployed or underemployed people who were promised Utopia and received a pass in woodwork. Of course, this isn’t the only country with that problem. Perhaps we need to supplement traditional problem solving tools with more unique, integrated thinking as to how this issue can be addressed before social unrest worsens and spreads.

Andrew Seldon

Editor

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