BY RODNEY BOSCH, SDM Senior Editor

As digital threats loom large, manufacturers and security integrators are uniting to fortify the defenses of physical security systems. Discover how these industry players are navigating varied complexities and helping safeguard end users in the evolving realm of cybersecurity.

Justin Stearns of Chimera Integrations describes the future in almost existential terms, with a changing industry landscape potentially thrusting significant pressures on physical security integrators to alter the makeup of their organizations. An intensely competitive job market for technicians with cyber and IT IQ, not to mention spiking payrolls, is fueling such a scenario. For instance, a prominent communication technology company recently lured away from Chimera a skilled technician by offering him a hefty pay raise.

“I think down the road it’s us working with a lot more electrical contractors and doing almost zero wiring at all, and honing our team in on programming and termination and final hookup,” he says. “But then it’s also not allowing our industry to be hijacked by other industries. How do you stay relevant when you’ve got companies like Cisco selling to the customer? And how do we stop the MSPs from taking our industry? Our readers are PoE. Our controllers are PoE. Even light systems are all LED and PoE. Who is going to own that world?”

There has to be a closer partnership with cybersecurity companies and integrators that are providing physical security to better protect their clients and themselves, expresses Chris Maulding of AlchemyCore.

“A lot of people look at cybersecurity and they think, ‘Oh, that can’t happen to me.’ It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when. And it’s just the ability to work closely together, staying each in our own lanes, but assisting one another in understanding the needs of the client and themselves,” he says. “We have to meet in the middle. Right now, there is a very big space in between the two. AlchemyCore’s goal is to try to bridge that gap and bring us together to work closer with integrators.”