Office buildings, banks, factories, hospitals, schools, shopping malls, sports arenas – these are just a few of the places where people gather, valuable assets are kept, and/or vital information is stored. As varied as they are, they all have an obvious need for a corporate security solution. But the question remains whether to try and provide that security through internal resources, such as existing employees with the appropriate skills or through new hires, or to consider security outsourcing from a dependable provider.
Choosing a Corporate Security Solution
For smaller facilities, where resources of all kinds are typically more limited, the situation usually dictates the use of contracted security, simply because the organization lacks existing employees with the requisite skill sets, and it is too costly to hire full-time workers who have these skills. But for larger organizations or any organization with sufficient resources, the choice is a real one. Even then, however, a corporate security solution is usually the best option for a variety of reasons.
The first is that security outsourcing is very cost competitive. In fact, when all of the costs associated with providing a corporate security solution are considered, contract security is almost always less expensive than a home-grown, proprietary security solution. For example, hiring uniformed security guards as full-time employees entails the normal costs associated with any employee, such as salary, payroll taxes, paid vacation, medical and retirement benefits. But it often also includes additional costs specifically associated with the security function, such as specialized training in areas as diverse as emergency response, verbal de-escalation, counter surveillance and CPR.
With managed security services outsourcing, these necessities should be handled by the provider at no additional cost. In addition, an outside contractor handles all of the costs and administrative details associated with ongoing training, licensing of its workers, tracking and renewing licenses, paying state fees, handling workers’ compensation claims, administering unemployment claims, providing supervisory oversight and, if necessary, handling disciplinary actions.
In addition to these cost advantages, security outsourcing also provides a number of additional benefits at no cost that are essentially byproducts of the outsourcing model. For larger security outsourcing providers (like ABM), these include the ability to:
- Draw on expertise nationally (and internationally) to offer clients a broader array of choices and recommendations for mitigating security-related issues or events;
- Adapt proven security and process improvement plans to the client’s environment to create a customized corporate security solution that maximizes the efficacy of the overall security outsourcing program;
- Deploy proprietary technology that allows real-time alerts, report monitoring and GPS tracking;
- Draft, finalize and implement security policies and procedures;
- Leverage numerous security education and awareness programs to ensure that the people and systems comprising the corporate security solution remain relevant and reflect the most recent developments in security services;
- Conduct quarterly business reviews in order to identify security-related trends, outcomes and recommendations for program improvement; and
- Keep contractor management costs relatively static, allowing for Scope-of-Work additions with little-to-no indirect cost increases.
Perhaps the single greatest benefit from security outsourcing derives from the knowledge that once an appropriate security partner has been chosen this vital function – protecting information, hard assets and, most important, people – is in the hands of experts who are on top of the latest security-related issues, techniques and technologies. This trust in a comprehensive, corporate security solution in turn allows the company (or other organization) to focus its energies and expertise on where it’s needed most, to the benefit of its customers, employees, owners, shareholders, or other stakeholders. And that’s a benefit worth paying for.
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