2019 Security Industry Forecast: Insights From HID Global Executive
Hilding Arrehed opines on the biggest changes, challenges and opportunities for the electronic security ecosystem in the months ahead.
Hilding Arrehed, vice president of Cloud Services for HID Global, is among the more than a dozen security industry experts and analysts from all channel sectors to lend insights to the annual Security Sales & Integration Industry Forecast.
Arrehed is responsible for the physical access control Cloud services strategy and operation at HID Global. Prior to this role, he was senior director of professional services with HID Global and ActivIdentity, during which time he led the global identity and access management professional services operations.
In the following responses, Arrehed provides insights to the biggest changes, challenges and opportunities as they relate to the electronic security ecosystem in 2019 and beyond.
Security Technology
Cloud technologies are giving people access through their mobile phones and other devices to a variety of new experiences, while making their workplaces smarter and more data-driven. With the advent of identity- and location-aware building systems, virtual assistants and “personal IoT” solutions that recognize people and customize their office environment based on deep learning analytics, the workplace is undergoing a period of unprecedented change.
This change will also include greater adoption of biometrics. Cloud-based platforms will help bridge biometrics and access control by providing a trusted platform designed to meet the concerns of accessibility and data protection in a connected environment.
These barriers can be addressed through a secured and connected Cloud architecture that can remotely manage all readers and users — including onboarding, template loading and enrollment activities for supported authentication modes.
Hilding Arrehed
Security Markets
Education, finance, healthcare, enterprise and other niche markets, such as commercial real estate and enterprises focused on co-working spaces, will benefit from a Cloud connected hardware foundation. This will enable a faster, more simplified path from design to deployment, transforming how products and solutions are developed, marketed and scaled across the enterprise, as well as how they are adopted and used.
Developers will shift from having to create an entire vertically integrated solution to simply layering an app experience on top of an existing access control infrastructure already connected in the Cloud and made easily available through APIs and SDKs.
This will fuel market-making opportunities as new players are attracted to the space beyond traditional physical and IT security integrators, resulting in a richer and more vibrant development community focused on bringing to market new and innovative solutions. This community will be supported by new kinds of tools and services for integration enablement and support as compared to the traditional physical access control marketplace.
Business & Operations
Cloud connections will also facilitate new, more flexible subscription models that could enable users to more easily replenish mobile IDs if their smartphones are lost or must be replaced. These models have the potential to streamline forecasting, budgeting and reporting while pushing mobile credentials from a product-based model to more of a service-based approach. This also helps organizations move cost from a CAPEX budget to a pay-as-you-need-it OPEX line item.
Mobile ID subscriptions have the potential to be transferrable across an organization’s employees, and they can be more convenient for administrators to register multiple mobile IDs across multiple devices — whenever they need to and without having to place replenishment orders.
Overall Security Industry
Access control solutions based on Cloud platforms will move the industry beyond siloed security and workplace optimization solutions to simplicity, scalability and universality of mobile apps that can be downloaded anywhere across a global footprint of millions of compatible physical access control system endpoints that are all connected in the Cloud and IoT.
Overall Expectations
In general, it will be a year during which all industry players will need to watch for new ways to deliver value. There are already many new opportunities for system integrators to help their customers achieve new capabilities across a number of vertical markets and requirements.
For example, healthcare organizations need real-time location services to optimize workflows in emergency departments and clinical operations and helping patients and visitors navigate the hospital. Access control systems are also being extended to create more activity-aware environments in industries such as oil & gas, where it is crucial for security teams to receive the precise location of employees during emergency or “man down” situations.
Moving forward, new trusted ID solutions will have a dramatic impact on the role of the systems integrators and create opportunities to add more services to their portfolio. Ongoing advancements in security and identity technology will give rise to more intelligent environments that will deliver a comprehensive secure identity experience.
Systems integrators will be a crucial link in the value chain to ensuring this experience-driven focus on protecting people and assets in the future. Plus, we believe the market-making dynamics of new, more open hardware environments will attract new players beyond traditional physical and IT security integrators into a richer and more vibrant development community.
We also believe there will be a faster, more simplified path from design to deployment as these developers shift from having to create an entire vertically integrated solution to simply layering an app experience on top of an existing physical access control systems [PACS] infrastructure.
Pressing Security Industry Issues
Physical and cybersecurity threats continue to become more complex. Another challenge is the task of managing both physical and digital credentials as well as a rapidly growing number of connected endpoints in the Internet of Things.
We are witnessing the collision of the enterprise with the IoT, and organizations now must establish trust and validate the identity of people as well as “things.” All of this is happening against the backdrop of increasingly stringent safety and data privacy regulations.
Organizations must streamline the compliance process while creating significantly smarter and more data-driven workplaces that take a risk-based approach to threat protection while optimizing productivity and giving users seamless and more convenient access to the enterprise and its physical and digital assets and services.
What might surprise security professionals?
The biggest surprise to security professionals may be how enterprise customers are now beginning to look at access control. It is no longer simply a mechanism for securing doors, data and other assets, but also provides the means to create trusted environments within which organizations can deliver valuable new user experiences.
There also has also been a mainstreaming of mobile access to enhance user convenience and increase efficiency while delivering higher security as compared to legacy access control implementations. With the move to mobile, customers are looking for more “digital cohesion” in which everything can be interconnected and available through an app on their smartphone, from opening doors to authenticating to enterprise data resources to accessing a building’s applications and services.
Finish this sentence: 2019 will be remembered as the year the electronic security industry …
…embraced biometrics and advanced data analytics.
Data analytics is currently one of the biggest areas of interest — how to use machine learning analytics to generate valuable insights from today’s access control solutions. In a hospital, this provides extremely useful insights for optimizing how, for instance, common areas and individual exam and other rooms are used, and how workflows should be configured in emergency departments and clinical operations.
Devices, access control systems, IoT applications, digital certificates and location services solutions that are all connected to the cloud can collectively deliver robust data with which to apply advanced analytics and risk-based intelligence. As organizations incorporate this type of analytics engine into their access control systems, they will improve security and personalize the user experience while driving better business decisions.
Biometrics adoption will grow in consumer applications as well as in public-sector use cases such as immigration and border control, law enforcement, and military and defense market segments.
Meanwhile, in the enterprise, the next generation of fingerprint solutions will include options for much higher matching speed and better image capture quality and overall performance, and liveness detection will become increasingly important for ensuring captured data is from a living person. The availability of application programming interfaces [APIs] will remove a previous pain point for biometrics authentication and enable solutions to be integrated directly with the access control infrastructure.
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