Security spending on the rise, new Brivo-ASIS report finds

Brivo and ASIS International released their fifth annual Physical Security Industry Survey, based on responses from more than 500 U.S.-based physical security and facility management professionals, fielded from November 2020–January 2021. Results reveal that more than half of respondents see increases in spending on security in the near future. 

The Brivo Smart Security Trends Report: Physical Security Disruption in the COVID Era focuses on physical security impacts from COVID, challenges facing organizations as they look to reopen their doors, as well as technology, cloud, and data utilization trends shaping the physical security landscape for 2021.

I, of course, reached out to Brivo President and CEO Steve Van Till to get his perspective on the four key trends the report looks at, including:

• COVID changes physical security priorities;
• Technology integrations continue to be a major focus;
• Cloud adoption accelerates security modernization; and
• Data analytics helps navigate the next era of access control.

Looking big picture, Van Till said proptech plays an interesting role in all of this:

“I see COVID and the Proptech boom as unrelated but coincidental drivers that have simultaneously pushed three things to the fore – access control in general, mobile credentials and cloud for everything,” Van Till told Security Systems News. “A lot of Proptech is about amenity management, and I think we’d all agree that protecting your health is the ultimate amenity, which wasn’t the case until COVID.”

Van Till pointed out that security has gotten an elevated status due to proptech needing it during COVID more than ever.

“Mobile credentials were becoming popular already,” he said. “Proptech pushed that trend even further, as the proptech apps for tenants need to have access control built in so they can be the one app for their building, or office, or for their hotel. COVID is another driver that is pushing everything in this direction.”

He continued, “The distribution of credentials, for example, was suddenly a much bigger challenge during COVID than ever before. Being able to send a new employee an access credential remotely is tremendously useful. So convenience and necessity come together.”

Cloud, of course, is the key technology to make all of this possible. “What can I say that I haven’t said already, except that Proptech is 100% cloud-based, and COVID underscored one more benefit — remote management.”

Increased Spending on Security and Cloud

One of the key findings in the report is that 75 percent of respondents said that the importance of physical security has increased at their organization, with 60 percent seeing an immediate need, or are considering an upgrade to their security technology.

Moreover, 60 percent of respondents said they either see a need for immediate cloud technology upgrades or are considering it in the future.

“The increased spending is interesting to me and I am convinced the survey is accurate because I am seeing the same result coming out of different surveys from many different audiences,” Van Till said. “So I just read a Deloitte report, for example, this morning that came up with similar results, with 46 percent of people going to spend more money on digital infrastructure for their buildings and of course security is one of those things that goes in there for the reasons I described before. And if you look at increased spending in proptech and the investment in proptech, that also is because people are interested in spending more to catch up.”

One of the interesting things with the real estate market, Van Till said, is their willingness to admit that  they need to catch up technology-wise. “If you look at what we are seeing from security personnel – and this is really an ASIS audience we are surveying here – what they are seeing inside of the security suite is basically mirrored in many different studies, reports and data sets that are outside of theirs. Many are coming to the same conclusion on increased spending, whether it is on the business or security side.”

Data Analytics

The report also sees an increasing role for data analytics within security.

“People are getting more of an appetite for data analytics,” said Van Till. “Now that we are getting better instrumentation, lower cost sensors and people are applying more powerful analytics that are easy to get in the cloud, like from AWS or Snowflake – hundreds of companies – for the larger enterprises, helping them to understand their security data is much easier to deliver now. So I think it is going to raise the bar in terms of expectations for analytics and visualization because the demand has been there for many years, and that is what we have been hearing: ‘I need something better for my data,’ which means more spending in this area.”

Now that the report is going on five years, Van Till is excited to be able to look at the data over time.

“We look forward to continuing this study with ASIS, because one of the things we are interested in is having the longitudinal data over the five years, so looking at what it was five years ago, three years ago, and then now, for example,” Van Till pointed out. “I think that is when a lot of these surveys start to get really interesting when you can track year-to-year-to-year what the differences are in attitude, in having installed some of these technologies that people are talking about. So, watching a change over time is really one of the more interesting aspects of doing this repeatedly.”

Click here to access the full report.