When we look back at the physical security environment of the mid-2020s, the greatest hurdle was not a lack of technology, but a lack of connection. Campus safety teams were drowning in data, forced to operate within a complex network of security silos.

The video management system (VMS) didn’t inherently talk to the access control system (ACS), and neither spoke fluently to the intrusion alarms. An operator monitoring a busy student union would receive an isolated “door-held” alarm in one software window, then have to manually switch to a second application, identify the correct camera, and scrub the footage just to verify if the incident was a security breach or just a student holding the door for a friend.

This fragmented approach, which is the essence of reactive security, led directly to alert fatigue, slow response times, and missed opportunities to truly understand the dynamics of an incident.

To read the full article as published in Campus Safety Magazine, click here.