Physical security is the safeguarding of people, equipment, networks, and data against physical acts and occurrences that could seriously harm a business, government organisation, or institution.

The physical security framework is made up of three main components: access control, surveillance and testing. The degree to which each of these elements is implemented, enhanced, and maintained can frequently be used to measure the effectiveness of a physical security programme for an organisation.

Access Control

Limiting and managing who has access to places, facilities, and resources is the key to maximising one’s physical security measures. Measures used to restrict access to certain assets to authorised persons only are included in access control. These corporate walls frequently come in the form of ID badges, keypads, and security personnel. However, these barriers might differ substantially in terms of approach, technique, and price.

Access controls that are more advanced use a technology-supported strategy. Security teams can employ ID card scanners and near-field communication (NFC) ID cards as physical authentication techniques to confirm people’s identities as they enter and leave different locations.

Before investing in such hardening measures, organisations should weigh the benefits and costs of their adoption.

Surveillance

This is one of the most crucial physical security elements for both incident recovery and prevention. The technology, manpower, and resources that corporations utilise to keep an eye on various real-world places and facilities’ operations are referred to in this context as surveillance. Patrol guards, heat sensors, and notification systems are a few examples.

Closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras, which capture activities over several regions, are the most popular sort of surveillance. The advantage of these surveillance cameras is that they are useful for both preventing and catching criminal activity.

Testing

Physical security is an incident reaction and prevention measure. Plans for disaster recovery (DR), for instance, focus on the effectiveness of physical security systems and how well a business can recognise, address, and limit threats. Implementing active testing is the only method to guarantee that such DR policies and procedures will be efficient when the time comes.

These policy tests ought to be carried out on a regular basis to ensure that roles and duties are understood and limit the possibility of errors.

Conclusion

IoT-related dependency among enterprises increases the requirement for both digital and physical security. IoT necessitates a high level of physical security to protect data, servers, and networks. Physical security now encompasses a wider range thanks to the IoT’s growing interconnection. Applications and virtual machines (VMs) running in the cloud, for instance, are only as secure as their underlying physical servers.

In order to prevent significant data losses, these data centres need to be adequately secured employing physical security measures, regardless of whether enterprises invest in first-party or third-party cloud computing services.