TechSec crowd gets revved by Dave Tyson

DALLAS--Here at the Fairmont Hotel, the third annual TechSec Solutions' educational program kicked off Feb. 27 at 8 a.m. with a presentation by Dave Tyson, chief security officer for the city of Vancouver. In an hour-long talk for 400 attendees, Tyson emphasized real-world and sometimes simple solutions for converging physical and logical security systems. For instance, he has physical security guards walking around making sure laptops are secured and carrying wi-fi detectors to make sure there aren't any rogue access points to the network. "When I arrived in Vancouver," he said, "I found an access server and I asked, 'When was the last time it was patched.' He answered, 'What's a patch?'" As an IT professional moving into physical security, Tyson has a unique view on everything from investigation to IP surveillance. "Convergence is a strategic activity," he emphasized. "It is not technology integration. That's just one of the tools or steps. It also includes people and process. It's about creating business value, reducing costs, duplications and risk." How can physical security integrators take advantage of this new converged atmosphere? "Deploying technology is easy," Tyson said. "But the understanding of the impact of security is hard ... The common language is risk." If integrators can understand risk mitigation across the enterprise, he said, from keeping people from entering the front door to keeping them from spamming the email network, they will be serving end users in the proper way.