November is Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience Month. CISA defines resilience as “doing the work upfront to prepare for a disruption, anticipating that it will in fact happen, and exercising not just for response but with a deliberate focus on continuity and recovery, improving the ability to operate in a degraded state, and significantly reducing downtime when an incident occurs.”

In line with this year’s theme, how can physical security teams resolve to be resilient?

First and foremost: Map all your assets

Before you can secure your physical security devices, you need to know what devices are on your network in the first place. Simply put, you can’t protect what you can’t see. By discovering, identifying, and documenting all the physical security devices within your infrastructure, you can better monitor and manage the security of each device, mitigating downtime. 

Why this is harder than it sounds

Given the complexity of the typical physical security infrastructure, it’s hard to keep track of every device manually. You may be juggling multiple device types, makes, and models, often across large sites and/or multiple locations. This information is usually available somewhere – the challenge is consolidating all of it from different vendors in one easily accessible location for visibility across devices and locations.

How to do it effectively

Here are three steps we have found that help physical security teams reach their goals, including resilience:

1. Create an inventory: Ensure you have a record of all physical security devices connected to your network.
2. Manage it in one place: Consolidate your view of all your devices in a single place to avoid silos which make managing more inefficient and time-consuming.
3. Regular updates: Maintain and regularly update the asset map to reflect any changes in the device landscape.

Explore approaches like automation

The manual processes that worked in the past for tracking devices can’t keep pace with today’s needs. One way to make sure you’re always on top of your assets is to use an automated solution for managing all your connected devices. 

Automation offers benefits like improved system availability and faster time to resolution – and it makes your daily workflow much easier. An accurate and updated picture of your devices and systems is key for the health of your physical security infrastructure, and it saves you bandwidth and budget. If something does go wrong – you’ll be ready to respond. To quote Confucius: “The superior man, when resting in safety, does not forget that danger may come.” #BeResilient

Download The Guide to Future-Proofing Your Physical Security for more on how to stay resilient.