2020 will go down in history as one of the most challenging times the world has been through. Like all other businesses in 2020, the physical security industry had its ups and downs too. Overall, two sectors of physical security - traditional security firms and corporate security teams - each had their fair share of challenges. 

Traditional security guard firms (those that provide services to businesses for protection and threat deterrence) faced a few common challenges with people, processes, and technology as security operations of all sizes adapted their operations for 2020 and beyond.

Corporate security professionals faced challenges that, while similar to other businesses, were unique. Corporate security teams are led by Chief Security Officers (CSOs) who are in charge of delivering a holistic security program, based largely on enterprise security risk management (ESRM), for their organizations. They manage facilities, data centers, manufacturing floors, and everything in between.

In order to understand the challenges facing corporate security leaders and how they differ (and compare) to traditional manned guarding, Thinkcurity looked at a recent report Trackforce Valiant released on the state of corporate security to better understand the challenges, priorities, and technologies that corporate security professionals used to adapt their operations.

This will be the first of a three-part series covering the top 4 challenges found in the report:

Challenge 1: The pandemic revealed flaws in the alignment of people and processes.

This challenge impacted the physical security industry all around. For corporate security, it revealed a missing component that provides true visibility and a single source of the truth. 

Challenge 2: Workforce training and accountability measures required overhauling.

Despite having a stronghold on their training practices and accountability measures among their workforce, corporate security professionals had to quickly adapt and make adjustments.

Challenge 3: Incident management procedures lacked accountability measures.

Incident management protocols were revamped requiring new reporting standardizations to be set in place.

Challenge 4: Poor security team communication practices opened the door to miscommunication.

27% of corporate security teams lacked adequate communication interfaces which resulted in unnecessary miscommunication.

Trackforce Valiant’s survey report revealed that corporate leaders found better ways to align their people, processes, and technology in order to quickly adapt to meet unprecedented challenges. 

In the second part of this series, we’ll reveal the 5 key challenges corporate security leaders will tackle in 2021.

Don’t wait for part 2. Read the report right now.

Get The State of Corporate Security Report

About the Research

The research team conducted a survey to over 350 corporate security executives across a multitude of industries to ask about their top challenges and adaptations for 2020 and 2021. The majority of roles ranged from manager level and above, with companies spanning 200 employees to well over 10,000. While the majority were solely responsible for physical security at their company, some worked in both physical and cybersecurity and had a good range of number of locations they managed and number of guards per location. It was from this group the research team built the study.