What I do when I’m not on my holidays.

I did ask if anyone would be interested in hearing what corporate security is really all about so here, by popular request* it is.

Well, you’re not alone. Being on the approaching overripe side of mature, most of the contracts I get involve dispelling this sort of view of security in the companies I am engaged to help.

Corporate, or, as I prefer to say, Business Security is not about locks, bars, bolts guards and dogs, though these are, so to speak, tools of the trade. Business security is all about keeping people safe, keeping physical assets from theft or other misuse, and keeping a company’s intangible assets – proprietary information, brand reputation, intellectual property – from inappropriate or illicit disclosure. I also concerns preventing losses, through theft or illegal competition, (counterfeiting, smuggling,) and ensuring, or attempting to ensure, that a company is resilient enough to continue trading after a crisis or disaster – natural disasters such as fire, floods, or earthquakes, and man-made crises like civil unrest, war, revolution and the like.

It sounds like quite a task, doesn’t it? So how do you go about it? First and foremost, a business security manager has to be a business manager. You must know the business in the same way as any other manager and you must make sure that security programmes, policies and procedures are both effective for the purposes for which they are intended, reducing losses or ‘shrinkage,’ for example, and supportive of the business goals of the company. This is something that people like me, who cross to the darkside of international business from the pure and sunny uplands of military or other uniformed service, have to take on board pretty quickly. If you don’t, you end up with a security department that is a hindrance to doing business, rather than a help, and that is viewed by the rest of the business as something like this:

Should I go on?