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Security Budgets: Money Well Spent

When it comes to security budgets, less can be more. Here are seven tips for discovering how to squeeze every bit out of yours.

But as everyone knows, security vendors can also be indifferent partners to say the least. CSOs can sometimes save money and achieve a higher quality of service if they are able to redeploy their own internal resources to accomplish a task. At PPG Industries, Becker has been frustrated with the level of reliability and service of their access control vendor and is examining strategies in that area and others to eliminate service agreements and bring some functions back in-house. "It's tough to get attention when there are just a few big players in the market," complains Becker. PPG is already successfully relying on its technical staff in its R&D business centers to do more and more of the general security tech support. 7 Use People, in a Good Way When budgets tighten, the security organization's staff often falls under the scrutiny of business leaders eager to cut costs. While CSOs hate to lose their employees, the justification has to be there for each person on the payroll. At Avaya, Allison looks for ways to get value out of every member of her team. "There's a tendency to cut back on staff, and they really are the biggest investment that you have," she says. As in any industry, the younger employee is cheaper, but in security, youth is no match for experience. "I may have a young investigator and an old investigator, but the older guy can get that confession on the table," says Allison. Instead of teaching old dogs new tricks, Allison's strategy is to let the old dogs and the young dogs run together and learn from each other.

The importance of keeping skilled employees over cheaper, inexperienced labor is seconded by Stephen Baker, vice president and manager of corporate security at State Street Corp. "I would rather pay more money and have less officers than have a whole bunch of officers that don't know what they're doing," he says. "I want the ex-military guy that knows when to ask questions, and I think that's a lot more valuable than a high school student on a learning curve."

One area that most CSO agree is ripe for finding cost savings is in guard contracts. "Everybody spends millions on guards whose contracts must be continually reassessed," says Bacon. That's challenging because, as he points out, guards become "an emotional fixture." Even in cases where they are not adding enormous concrete value, people perceive a greater sense of security because of their presence. Bacon has used technology to reduce some of those guard costs with the integration of access control, CCTV and digital video systems to remotely monitor sites.