The UK's leading financial houses are increasing their spend on security in a bid to quash heightened concerns about disasters, terrorist attack and IT security breaches
Survey results just published by Reliance Security Services suggest that many of the UK's top financial organisations are paying heed to last month's calls for them to guard against "IT terror" (News, SMT, March 2003, p9) by increasing their overall spend on security measures. However, nearly 40% of security managers working in the sector still don't consider their firms' disaster recovery plans to be 100% foolproof.

The survey has discovered that nearly 50% of the financial community view disasters and terrorist attacks as "extremely important" threats (ie the highest possible level of concern) to their business. To deal with those threats, security managers are deploying a mixture of manned security, access control (96% of those surveyed) and other forms of electronic security (85%).

"While the survey indicates that a large proportion of financial organisations are now placing a greater emphasis on electronic solutions (56% of those surveyed), their spending on manned security is still on the up," commented Reliance Security Services managing director Geoffrey Shewry.

"This emphasises the fact that the manned security sector has a vital role to play in the general movement towards total, integrated security solutions," continued Shewry.

Despite indicating an increased movement towards electronic solutions, the survey revealed that nearly 60% of financial organisations would not consider using security technology to reduce their dependence on manned security at night. The main reason for this is that security officers are responsible for controlling access outside of normal working hours (33% of respondents).

The survey also found that security officers are becoming much more valuable to end user businesses by fulfilling a much wider range of roles, including reception duties (70%), electronic surveillance (41%), building management (37%) and monitoring access control (52%).

Another interesting trend is the extent to which financial organisations value the quality of security personnel. 67% of respondents consider the calibre of an organisation's officers as "extremely important" when selecting a supplier. Service levels (56%), customer empathy (31%) and Health and Safety training (26%) were also singled out as being highly important to the security 'mix'.

81% of those financial sector security managers surveyed said that they are in favour of industry regulation as a way of raising standards.

Although spending on disaster recovery has apparently increased, less than 50% of those financial sector managers questioned believe their plans for such a scenario to be watertight.

Not surprisingly, IT security breaches are seen as a major threat by those working in the financial sector.

Source

SMT