The Challenge of Corporate Safety and Security

Abstract

This paper describes how large organizations need to control several different sectors of corporate safety and security including, for example, occupational health and safety, environmental safety, premises security, crime prevention, rescue operations and emergency planning, information security, and personnel security. All of these sectors contribute towards total corporate safety and security. The operating range of safety and security is quite wide and the responsibilities, activities and procedures connected with safety and security are often patchy, diverse, and at times even overlapping. Despite all this, corporation must also meet the new safety and security challenges: protection against terrorism, security of networked systems, and also demands for the corporate risk management. The future needs for security and safety management were studied in 2004 by undertaking a literature review and interviewing experts at VTT. Key questions of the study were: (1) how the term security can be defined; (2) which parties are involved in the security business, in research and development and in the general national security activities in Finland: (3) what are the future challenges, visions and research needs of security; and (4) how total corporate security management can be modeled. This paper discusses the need for co-operation between the previously mentioned sectors in safety and security management. The main purpose is to initially model the range of corporate security, and the idea of total safety and security management. Based on all the research carried out, principles and ideas for connecting the safety and security sectors at the corporate level will be presented.