In 2022, the lasting effects of the pandemic and other geopolitical events will drive new technological shifts and considerations. Some of the top physical security trends to watch out for include the standardization of open and interoperable solutions across smart cities, faster hybrid cloud adoption, and a sharper focus on supply chain risks.
 
Other physical security trends such as building occupancy monitoring, cybersecurity defense strategies, and adaptable access control technology will continue to evolve. This article looks at which physical security trends will have the most impact in the coming year.

Monitoring occupancy and space utilization will remain a top priority

Monitoring occupancy and space utilization will remain a top priority across many markets in 2022. Within months of the pandemic, businesses were deploying different solutions to track occupancy in their buildings and control social distancing. Almost two years later, this trend is still growing because they’re seeing value from the data collected.
 
Many organizations in various sectors from transit and retail to healthcare and banking are using occupancy management solutions, people counting analytics, and access control data to keep up with health and safety mandates.
 
What’s shifting is the understanding that these solutions go beyond safety objectives. More organizations recognize how much occupancy management, and more broadly, spatial analytics data, can benefit their operations and business. For instance, monitoring queues in places such as airports, stores, or stadiums, can reduce wait times, optimize staff scheduling, and improve the customer experience.
 
Corporate offices are also finding ways to best optimize their workplaces as they give employees the flexibility to split up their work time between the office and home. This space utilization intelligence helps them better track employee office attendance, monitor meeting room demands, or make informed floorplan changes such as adding more desk-sharing options.
 
All of this leads to higher operational efficiencies, effective resource management, and big cost savings.

Video analytics will become more viable for large-scale deployments

In recent years, more businesses have been turning to video analytics solutions to strengthen site security, gain new insights, and solve unique problems. Greater adoption of video analytics has also been propelled by technologies such as machine learning and deep learning, which offer the potential to automate a lot of data processing and workflows while delivering actionable information to operators.
 
While demand for these solutions might be strong, deploying analytics at an enterprise level isn’t always practical. Too often, setup complexities and hardware requirements leave larger businesses questioning whether the investment in analytics justifies the outcome.
 
As we move into 2022, video analytics applications will continue to mature in ways that make them easier and more economical to deploy at scale. This will be made possible by vendors who focus on hardware resource efficiency and offer more granular controls for running analytics at certain intervals or schedules, instead of continuously.

Cybercrime will continue to grow and inspire new strategies

A report by Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that global crime costs will reach $10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025. With a growth rate of 15% per year, this is said to represent the greatest transfer of economic wealth in history.
 
With the digital transformation being a top priority for end users and systems integrators, manufacturers will face greater scrutiny of the quality and cybersecurity of the products that they sell. While manufacturers are getting better at reducing the number of vulnerabilities per line of code, the exponential growth in IoT devices is outpacing this improvement thereby amplifying the problem.
 
And as more devices come online and data processing becomes central to operations, businesses will need to remain agile and responsive to the evolving threat landscape. Their customers will also demand greater transparency about how they are keeping data secure and private.
 
All of this will usher in an entirely new model for cybersecurity that relies on continuous verification rather than just hardening networks and systems.

With this in mind, building layers of protection into a security ecosystem won’t be enough. Decision-makers will also be looking to implement more offensive cybersecurity strategies and choose partners who offer higher levels of automation to stay on top of potential threats.

Open architecture will help catalyze the smart city movement

According to a report titled IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Smart Cities and Communities 2021 Predictions, smart city investments will increase to $203 billion by 2024. These smart cities are collecting vast amounts of data and want to capitalize on this information to keep improving urban safety and liveability.
 
Intelligent buildings are also integral to the smart city’s ecosystem. Whether airports, hospitals, or corporate offices, various organizations are seeking to analyze data from multiple sensors and automate processes.
 
The challenge is that embracing digital transformation and automation requires cities and businesses to move away from proprietary solutions. The closed-architecture model innately creates human and data silos and stifles growth opportunities.
 
Looking ahead, many public and private sector decision-makers will focus on open and interoperable solutions. This will help them get the most value from existing technology investments by strengthening data sharing and collaboration. Longer-term, they’ll also become more agile to evolving requirements and more autonomous with data unification and ownership goals.

Businesses will keep embracing adaptable access control technology

 Traditionally a proprietary market, the access control market is now shifting to a more open one, providing customers with choices that better meet their unique needs. Forward-thinking organizations will be opting for modern, cybersecure IP-based platforms so they can do more with their system while protecting their businesses from cyberattacks or malware.
 
Organizations today expect more from their access control solutions. Where once businesses would rely on access control technology to manage cardholders and monitor door alarms, end-user needs are growing. Not only are they demanding more flexibility in hardware choices, but they also want to streamline processes and offer more convenience to those who manage and move through their buildings every day.
 
Throughout the pandemic, they’ve also been trying to juggle new health and safety mandates and manage social distancing throughout their buildings. Today, no matter where organizations are on the return-to-office spectrum, the new normal requires adaptability. This is why many businesses are investing in physical identity access management (PIAM) solutions.
 
With a self-service PIAM system, businesses can automate employee and visitor access requests and remotely adjust access rights for all employees to better ensure safety and compliance. And by unifying access control and PIAM systems, onsite movement can be tracked, making it easier for organizations to identify potential COVID-19 transmission.
 
As the new year unfolds, this trend towards more modern and adaptable access control technology will grow. This will help businesses keep people healthy and safe, better secure buildings, and ensure higher levels of compliance for corporate, industry, and pandemic-related mandates.

Supply chain issues will gain more focus and attention

The supply chain issues that the world is currently experiencing will encourage businesses to be less dependent on single-source, proprietary solutions. Forward thinking organizations will instead seek open-architecture solutions that offer them increased choice and flexibility based on requirements and current availability.
 
But there’s more to supply chain issues that the current shortage of goods and materials. As cybercriminals become more sophisticated, there’s even greater pressure on organizations to scrutinize the cybersecurity measures, standards, and certifications of their entire supply chain ecosystem.
 
As cyber-attacks become more sophisticated, organizations are under a lot of pressure to scrutinize the cybersecurity measures, standards, and certifications of their entire supply chain ecosystem.
 
According to the Cybersecurity Agency of Singapore, ransomware incidents, online scams, and Covid-19-related phishing activities dominated the cyber landscape of 2020.
 
Looking back throughout 2021, we saw how the Taiwanese computer and electronics supplier, Quanta, became the source of a data breach for the latest Apple products, while a recent attack on Indonesia's national police server enabled hackers to obtain the data of 28,000 officers.
 
In a world where organizations no longer have clearly defined network perimeters, we’ll see more businesses and government agencies broadening the scope of their cybersecurity policies to establish baseline security standards for the solutions they purchase and the vendors they partner with.

More organizations will make the move to the cloud and embrace a hybrid deployment

While there’s still some unease about the security of the cloud, many businesses are coming to realize that the cloud is more secure, than their current corporate firewalls and infrastructure. That’s because cloud solutions are always up to date with the latest cybersecurity and privacy measures. These built-in defenses help to ensure strong cyber resilience and compliance, with minimal impact on resources.
 
This coupled with the accelerated digital transformation, the rising costs of server infrastructure and the need for greater agility when deploying new solutions has paved a path towards greater cloud adoption.   
 
And while organizations might not prepared to fully transition to the cloud, many are opening up to the hybrid cloud deployment model as an opportunity to trial new applications.
 
This could include implementing a digital evidence management system to speed up video and data sharing between different departments during investigations, deploying a cloud video management system to secure a high-risk remote location, or installing a PIAM system to better manage access rights for all employees. 
 
As more businesses take a step towards trialing cloud applications, they’ll quickly understand the benefits of hybrid cloud. That will produce even greater forward momentum in the adoption of cloud technologies in the coming year.

The digital transformation will hinge upon open unified security platform

With the rapid changes created by the digital transformation, the true value of unified security solutions is coming to the forefront. Physical security professionals have become the unwitting custodians of the IoT and a unified physical security solution enables them to manage and leverage the data to create strategic and actionable business intelligence that can be used to improve operations and increase ROI.
 
Faced with limited resources during the pandemic, many end-user organizations have prioritized ongoing investment in existing systems, and repurposed and adapted their existing security infrastructure to meet some of the new pandemic-related challenges. Over the last year, we have found that organizations that had already embraced a digital transformation prior to the pandemic were able to weather the downward economic trends and for some, even thrive. On the other hand, those who had not, have felt the impact of the negative economic trend more acutely.
 
However, embracing this digital transformation requires businesses to move away from proprietary solutions. The closed-architecture model innately creates human and data silos, limits data aggregation, and stifles growth opportunities. Looking ahead, many stakeholders responsible for the deployment of technologies will focus more on open and interoperable solutions. This will not only help them derive the most value from existing technology investments by strengthening data sharing and collaboration, but it will also keep them agile to evolving requirements and support long-term data unification goals.