A new era in security provision?

New Zealand was awesome

A couple of months ago, I went there with my family for a holiday.

Three weeks spent on an antipodean adventure following the England Ladies Cricket Team around New Zealand was superb, with many happy memories for my wife and I, but in particular our daughter Martha who is an enthusiastic cricketer.

Martha is also a Taylor Swift fan.

Ms Swift’s Eras Tour has reportedly made her a billionaire. Certainly, in New Zealand and Australia tickets were in crazy high demand, and whole cities disrupted by her arrival for a concert together with tens of thousands of fans.

Now I might not be able to tell  you much about Taylor’s set – to be honest, my musical tastes are more stuck in the 80s and 90s than the modern genre.

However, I can tell you a thing or two about her security arrangements, because they are very relevant to the new security offering that we at ASEL have developed for retail. One that I think raises the bar above anything that has previously been available.

Taylor Swift’s recent concert in Paris was “guarded” by AI-powered video surveillance. This has been installed by the City in preparation for inevitably heightened security risks associated with the Summer Olympics 2024.

The algorithms, deployed for real-time surveillance, detect suspicious or potentially dangerous events; including weapons, fire, bodies on the ground, abandoned packages and abnormal crowd behaviours. And that’s great, as far as it goes.

At ASEL we have been carefully examining how technological innovations in security are deployed. Things like video analytics, access control, surveillance, face recognition, physical guarding, converged management, perimeter security, drone systems and CBRNE (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and Exploding threats, if if you did not know) systems to detect, contain and mitigate such threats.

We look at how these systems are deployed locally. And in some situations you are looking at a deployment over a much wider area; nationally or even internationally when you are considering cross border threats.

One thing stands out.

As excellent as the technology may be, it all operates in a silo. Each of the technologies produces outputs. Think of the amount of data that is being produced! And even with systems to eliminate superfluous data and focus on identifying and dealing with threats, at no point is all the data viewed holistically by a system that can sift through it effectively and decide what is and is not relevant as a whole. That holistic judgement falls to a team of people monitoring all of the outputs.

As a result, despite the vast amount of information gathered the ultimate decisions may end up being disjointed. Decisions made by perhaps giving undue weight to one security technology than another. Or a failure to see the bigger picture that all of the outputs are telling you because of a bias towards one or two as the most reliable indicators – a perennial problem, with the potential for catastrophic misjudgements to be made as was the case in the Hillsborough Disaster.

ASEL’s new offering is based upon three stages. Risk Assessment, Risk Modelling and Risk Assurance.

Our Risk Assurance technology will bring together the various outputs from the array of outputs and using AI will help decisions to be made that look at the whole picture rather than just base decisions on fragments of it.

This will make the quality of decisions being made day to day, whether for a Taylor Swift concert, the Summer Olympics ’24, or the protection of stakeholders in your retail business faster, more accurate and more cost effective than ever before.

The ability to deploy such technology heralds a new era in security provision. And at ASEL we intend to be in the vanguard of that new era.