Let’s face it, it is rare to find exciting innovation from the security industry’s big-dog conglomerates. We usually expect change to be incremental and without surprise from these industry behemoths while the startups more commonly provide noteworthy new ideas, technologies, and solutions. This is why we walked away from a what-we-expected-to-be-routine interview at this year’s GSX conference just a little befuddled. What we just learned didn’t seem to fit this tried and true paradigm. Johnson Controls had just introduced us to a couple of industry-changing solutions more befitting an agile industry newcomer. We thought our readers would want to know more about these innovations.
As you’ll see below, integrated security solutions have turned a corner. No longer limited to interfacing, or even integrating, disparate systems, we have finally arrived at that place where the same level of data harnessing and analysis enjoyed by cybersecurity systems for a few years now can be baked into modern integrated physical security solutions.
A big shout out to Susan Post of Johnson Controls who introduced us around and exposed us to some of their latest data harnessing solutions.
In reviewing these innovations from Johnson Controls, let’s start with a new SaaS-based platform that digitizes your Security Operations Center (SOC) and ingests external data feeds, such as social media, weather or law enforcement announcements to develop a risk profile that allows the SOC to adopt a proactive security posture. Converged Cyber-Physical Security (CCS) provides a proactive, holistic, and smarter security solution. As a hardware-agnostic software solution, CCS enhances health and life-safety standards while providing measurable results and a basis for superior decision-making. It provides proactive threat protection by combining an advanced risk algorithm with other data. The result is that customers can save on operational costs and hardware spend, and improve their security return on investment.
CCS utilizes machine learning models and artificial intelligence to address real-time threats, while keeping a check on false alarms, resulting in a streamlined approach to security management. This approach helps to continuously improve risk management and increase overall operational efficiency. It will improve response times and assist with event prioritization while reducing the volume of nuisance alarms. It will even help you manage service and maintenance needs across your enterprise.
To help detect problems before they escalate, ensuring continuous system uptime, Johnson Controls offers another new innovation dubbed the Assurance Services software platform. Assurance Services automatically and continuously monitors data to deliver preventative service insights helping to maintain high availability and reliability of security assets. When problems are detected, a remote resolution team can automatically resolve issues in minutes, rather than days.
While providing asset tagging, mapping, as well as monitoring and servicing for compliance and cybersecurity risk prevention, Assurance Services offers a holistic view of your asset portfolio. Even automating common failures for easy identification and resolution, this platform ensures easier management of security operations.
If you have ever chaffed against being forced to choose between the confidence of doing business with a large well-established security company and the ability to leverage the latest in technology, we urge you to take a look at what Johnson Controls Digital Solutions has to offer. We hope that we are experiencing the dawn of a new era — an era that will deliver new and exciting innovation from the companies that cast the largest shadows on the security technology landscape.