Now on desks is the April 2021 print edition of Professional Security magazine, writes editor Mark Rowe.
As ever, there’s something for everyone whatever they have to do with the UK’s private security industry, whether they are an installer, specifier or consultant, or security manager, whatever their sector.
The covid-19 pandemic has only speeded up the move to online, including use of apps for the retail delivery of cooked food. Indeed, the widespread home working during the lockdowns since the pandemic struck the UK a year ago has been thanks to cloud-based IT. So it is with those apps such as Just Eat, that work off could storage rather than a server on premises. We hear how the cloud is secured.
Our main feature is about fraud, one of many crimes that has gone on regardless of covid-19; indeed, various government grant schemes without many or any precautions in case of fraud have meant an epidemic of fraud. The launch of a regional fraud forum, to cover the north west, was an occasion to hear about how the resources to counter fraud, such as the much-criticised national (or at least England and Wales, since Scotland pulled out) reporting line Action Fraud, and Companies House for those wishing to carry out due diligence. And the private investigator David Kearns of Expert Investigations writes about workplace dishonesty.
This month as last month we are running a series ‘looking ahead’, asking what private security will look like, once (as we all hope) lockdown is ended, and thanks to widespread vaccination the country is able to return to something like normal. Last month we featured hotels and hospitality; this month, aviation.
Una Riley our regular contributor goes into more detail about some of the winners of February’s Women in Security (WiS) awards; the 2020 winners were announced in a socially-distanced, remote awards studio at The Belfry outside Birmingham in February, which incidentally is due to be the venue for the first Security TWENTY event since covid-19, on June 29.
We speak to the crisis management consultant Jonathan Hemus, on the occasion of the publishing of his book Crisis Proof; he has some words of advice for security managers who are called upon to draw up scenarios for a crisis simulation.
We devote several pages to buildings. Not the most exciting places, and we rather took them for granted, before lockdown; but it may be a pleasurable experience to return to physical workplaces that we have not seen the inside of for 12 months and counting. Will those buildings, and the physical and electronic guarding of those places, be the same as before covid? The livelihoods of many depend on answers to those questions.
As for cyber, as part of Cyber Scotland Week we were invited to talk to two young people working in the cyber field, and heard about why they got into cyber in the first place, which might offer some clues about how to attract and retain cyber talent.
Plus the regulars – four pages of new products and services, four pages of ‘spending the budget’, Roy Cooper’s gossip page for manufacturers and distributors of security products, and the blog by Camilla Kirkham, Director of sales, security and AV (audio-visual) at the distributor Nimans.
