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Beat transportation sector security challenges

In South Africa, the transportation sector must deal with considerable challenges to successfully manage risk to operations and safeguard high-value assets such as goods; personnel; vehicles and vessels; and storage and terminal areas.

Technology solutions can assist to enable a comprehensive security and risk mitigation strategy, however.

Says Neil Cameron of Johnson Controls Systems and Services: "As an emerging market, South Africa has a large, thriving transportation sector, moving high volumes of goods not only nationally but internationally by road, track, sea and air. There are three key challenges this sector faces when it comes to security and risk mitigation, however: the high levels of violent crime in this country; the management and monitoring of numerous remote sites; and the challenge of retaining skills within the workforce.

"Given these issues, the ideal is to have integrated, centralised control over disparate security systems - and make use of intelligent, automated systems that do not require dedicated or highly trained onsite resources.

Integration of security and other systems has long been a problem but is essential. Cameron contextualises the situation: "Above and beyond the access control, fire alarms, environmental control and perimeter security systems implemented at terminals (such as ports, docks, warehouses and rail yards), transportation companies need to mitigate risk to operations and assets. This means taking note of myriad impacting factors such as weather patterns, congestion on routes, new regulations, critical logistics around goods; issues that may affect business continuity, and more.

"Each of these systems and factors need to be constantly monitored. More importantly, staff members need to be trained to recognise and intelligently respond to various situations. This is not always possible in remote sites where there is a dearth of trained staff and available personnel must fulfil many different tasks. In addition, using separate systems for each of these 'factors' makes it difficult to react timeously and in a coordinated way as all the information needed to make an informed decision first has to be collected and collated. This can lead to significant losses.

"An integrated system, on the other hand, offers a central console from which the entire operation can be monitored, providing context to alerts by enabling input from various systems - eg, CCTV and access control systems. This ensures all impacted facets of the business are taken into consideration in a decision."

Better yet, the intelligence built into some systems makes it possible for remedial steps to be taken immediately in a crisis situation, also provide pre-warning of the kind previously only possible where dedicated personnel were constantly monitoring specific areas.

Says Cameron: "Better informed decisions can be made with the assistance of technology. So, for instance, in the case of an incident such as a riot or intrusion, the CCTV feed from the affected area/s can be driven to the cellphones of select responsible personnel, areas can be locked down through instructions to the access control system, or higher security levels could be applied to certain areas.

"Standard, best practice approaches to critical events can also be pre-programmed into certain systems, increasing governance, the safety of people and the security of assets," he adds.

In addition, new technologies are making it possible to 'securitise' areas that were previously difficult to monitor. For port authorities, for instance, it has not been easy to control their sea perimeter. However, Johnson Controls has just released technology that provides virtual underwater sensors.

For any business, productivity, safety and service delivery excellence are critical. Security solutions are vital to achieving this. It is important that organisations functioning in this sector take note of what can be done to mitigate existing threats and risks, and build a strong best practices platform that will ensure future threats can be effectively dealt with.

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