Environmentally centric security
Is the security sector missing the opportunity to fully integrate and create the foundations needed to protect the environment? Here, we consider the implications of environmentally centric security.
Security companies operate within a world full of threats and risks. We provide services and solutions that protect others from them, constantly assessing and re-addressing, in order to stay one step ahead and, ultimately, protect.
To achieve this, we cannot afford to ignore what is happening around us, so we keep up with analysis and intelligence gathering, allowing us to adapt to trends and patterns. As weeks turn into months, months into years, we are continually moving and adjusting to maintain a position of being able to deliver the requirements to do so.
To list the threats and risks that customers face would require a lot of words, but we can safely say that, in today’s modern world, they range from theft to terrorism and from violence against women to lone worker safety.
If we were, however, to create a list of actual, tangible, and heightened threats and risks against businesses, organisations, agencies, and customers, what would be placed in the number one slot?
This will, of course, depend on the customer, with different risks taking priority. But there is one that stands out as being the ultimate risk – the planet itself.
Theft, safety for lone workers / women and terrorism will no longer be a problem if the world itself dies. Nothing will, for ultimately nothing will really exist and what does would not be able to communicate beyond line of sight, let alone in a manner to keep others safe.
Directional vision
As security providers, we have become so dedicated to our purpose that our vision is concentrated on the horizon itself, trying to peer over and see what is coming, to ensure we can protect from it. Seldom do we look back, into what is already here, within our own organisation and industry.
Most, if not all, threat and risks need to be combated internally before we can call ourselves committed towards protecting others. Each of us has our own environment, blended into the world’s version of it. Like anything built to be sustainable and effective it needs solid and secure foundations. A tree needs its roots to be watered and allowed to breathe.
Create your own environment
As an industry, we are excellent at protecting our customers, creating unique and bespoke services and solutions, embracing technology, and using data analysis to report and action upon. We have the ability to build game-changing, comprehensive and integrated solutions for our customers, covering a wide range of aspects.
We create policies and procedures and some great-looking presentations and brochures highlighting the steps, actions, and outcomes. But most are designed to create the service itself or, in some cases, to simply tick a box.
However, when it comes to using the same thought and practice, we seem to miss the opportunity to fully integrate within our own business, to create the actual foundations that will both serve and protect our own environment and that of our colleagues and customers.
Environmental centricity
Seeing everything as one and from all angles, from a point of protecting, allows a structure to be environmentally centric.
Forget Artificial Intelligence. It is people that matter. To create a service that truly protects, you must start with your own core and social values. Correctly created, any solution that comes from it has established, grounded roots, which ultimately protects the environment itself, in all contexts.
ESG (Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance), EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion), CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) and Social Values are not just nice-to-have policies and procedures.
They are centric necessities towards a safe, secure, and protected environment for all. In particular, to be environmentally centric you should:
- Know your carbon footprint – document it.
- Create a Carbon Management Plan – one that takes you to becoming net zero.
- Fully implement your core values into your business.
- Think Globally, Act Locally – control your own environment.
- Build your customer solution on your core values.
- Build partnerships that enhance your core values.
- Learn to say ‘No’.
As businesses designed to protect, we can do so much more by creating an all-encompassing environment, built from the ground up and on our own core values and vision. From here we can set into motion a truly centric security solution that is void of a singular image or purpose.
Jon Webster
MD, EOS Security
