Trends 2007: Physical And Logical Security Convergence

The integration of enterprise physical security controls and management regimes with enterprise IT security architectures is a nascent trend that has been forecast as imminent for several years. But despite the clear benefits to be gained from increased overall enterprise security risk management, the convergence trend is sluggish in taking hold among enterprises. Lack of clear exemplar converged architectures and a dearth of rich convergence-oriented vendor offerings are part of the reason. But the federal government's HSPD-12 initiative and key recent vendor announcements suggest that the convergence trend might finally be gaining some momentum.