Let's get physical

When it comes to physical security and information security, practitioners regularly talk about convergence, yet they're not always on the same page. In fact, they are not matching up. Post-9/11, there was a heightened sense of awareness about the need to better fuse physical and information security.

We saw a lot of discussion about the need for such, and some companies even merged these two aspects. The role of the CSO emerged as a must-have for these companies. But more than six years after the tragic events, what is being touted as "convergence" is really just integration.

On the physical security side, all we saw was migration - moving physical security sensors from stand-alone communications to IP networks. The only "convergence" here is a common migration to IP networks.

What had been proprietary (data formats) over proprietary (communications) has now become proprietary over IP (PoIP). To date, the physical security sensor vendors have ignored many of the lessons learned on the information security side: the notion that proprietary equals evil, while open standards are good.