Conversation about business risk today typically centers around cybersecurity. And for good reason: losses attributed to cybercrime in the U.S. topped $16.6 billion in 2024, according to the FBI.
Because cybersecurity dominates business headlines, organizations have started to build cybersecurity into the fabric of their corporate cultures and daily operations – whether it’s training at onboarding or multi-factor authentication requirements for business software and tooling.
But there’s a looming security threat that’s often overlooked: the physical security of a business’ people, assets, and data.
As workers have returned to the office, it’s become clear that organizations need to invest in building environments that are not just digitally secure – but also physically secure. That’s where security integrators play a crucial role: being trusted advisors who help bridge the gap between physical and cybersecurity strategies.
The State of Business Security Play
According to Gartner, spending on security and risk management is projected to total $215 billion in 2024, an increase of 14.3% from 2023. Yet physical security remains notably absent from the core areas being tracked. Even infrastructure protection—one of the few adjacent categories—accounts for just 15% of that total.
This disconnect creates a powerful opportunity for security integrators. The threat landscape is more diverse than ever, and physical security now plays a vital role in protecting the same critical assets as cybersecurity: employees, data, and intellectual property.
As physical and digital security become more intertwined for businesses, integrators are uniquely positioned to help customers build more unified, resilient security strategies—and in doing so, expand the value they deliver across the organization.
How Integrators Can Help Customers Take Action
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to converging physical and cybersecurity strategies, but integrators can guide customers by emphasizing a few foundational principles:
- First, start the conversation. If your customer’s physical security team doesn’t have a dotted line into their IT team, create space for a conversation. They don’t have to sit in the same organization, but ideally, you can act as a bridge and facilitate conversations about new strategies and solutions or active threats they’re mitigating. You never know when data or information from a physical security incident could play a critical role in an ongoing cyber investigation, or vice versa.
- Reduce the footprint of physical security hardware and software. The more vertically integrated your customer’s physical security solutions are, the easier it is for IT teams to partner with their physical security team to manage them. Instead of using a point solution for cameras and another point solution for access control, many physical security solutions now offer vertically integrated solutions so that if an unauthorized user tries to gain access to a server room, organizations can immediately investigate and identify the culprit with video footage and an access alert already paired together. As an integrator, you can guide your customers toward these streamlined solutions, reducing complexity and helping them build a more cohesive security posture.
- Educate your customers on the importance of updating physical security hardware and software regularly. Better yet, prioritize providers that push automatic firmware and software updates across all of their video security cameras, door locks, intercoms, and alarms, so that your customers’ IT and physical security teams don’t have to manually update across every location when there is a new patch.
- Reinforce regular reviews of physical security permissions and audit logs. Too often, access to physical security systems is outdated or may not reflect rapidly changing job responsibilities or titles at organizations. Integrators should encourage leaders to carefully and regularly review access permissions—or better yet, ensure their physical security systems are integrated with employee directories so that this is automated—to ensure that only the right people have access to physical security systems. Further, ensuring that physical security systems have audit logs is a stopgap solution to ensure that customers have a paper trail to understand every user who may have accessed their physical security systems and the changes they have made.
- Help develop a security-aware culture. Physical security isn’t just about the systems—it’s also about how people respond in critical moments. Work with your customers to develop and communicate clear physical security policies and emergency procedures to all employees. This includes protocols for reporting suspicious behavior, evacuation plans, and how to respond to various types of emergencies. Just like phishing tests, regular drills or training sessions can ensure that these procedures become second nature.
Ultimately, security isn’t just a digital concern—and for integrators, that means using their cross-disciplinary expertise to bridge the gap between physical and cybersecurity teams.
By guiding customers toward a more holistic security approach, integrators can help protect what matters most: people, company data, and IP.
Ksenia Kouchnirenko is the vice president of enterprise operations and technology at Verkada.
