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Building security is not just about installing the latest electronic gear and software package. Nor is it just a consideration for building types with highly specific occupancy considerations. Increasingly, buildings of all sorts are candidates for the kind of careful security planning that proceeds hand-in-hand with the architectural design process. To ensure an appropriate and cost-effective level of security, architects need to acquaint themselves with the range of security factors that affect design.
Security Against What?
The first question always has to do with what a security system is designed to protect. Obviously, a security systemS most important job is to provide safety for all the employees, the staff, and the visitors who use a building. But security considerations go far beyond this. Access control very often extends beyond merely controlling who may enter a building--and monitoring when and where they do so--to include the control and monitoring of the specific people permitted access to particular areas within a larger facility. For different sets of reasons, a range of different building types--healthcare facilities, banks, hotels, offices with sensitive data storage areas--all require such concentric layers or levels of access control.
As that brief list of building types begins to make clear, security considerations are hardly limited to protecting people. All of a building's contents need protection from damage or loss. That's immediately obvious, of course, for warehouses and retail outlets, banks, and pharmaceutical storage rooms in hospitals, where pains must be taken to prevent the theft, respectively, ofmerchandise, currency and negotiable securities, and drugs and controlled substances. But it's also clear from even this partial list that control of access must always be complemented by control of egress, that is, who leaves a facility and what they're allowed to carry out.
In technically sophisticated facilities, it's not just material property but information - and the systems that carry it--that must be protected from harm. In many contemporary facilities, data and data systems rank second in value only to people, and it's vital to remember that data must be protected not only from loss but, perhaps more important, from damage that could lead to "down time" and the financial and institutional chaos that might result.
Already, one can begin to see how security is not...