An HSDW conversation with John Stroia, vice president, Government Security and Monitoring Solutions, Diebold

2006, of Actcom, Inc., a privately held company with long experience in physical security systems. Actcom, based in Virginia Beach, Virginia, came with another important asset: significant expertise in identification and enterprise security, with a specialty in Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 (HSPD-12). This is the national policy aiming to provide a common identification standard for federal employees and contractors. Diebold considers HSPD-12 a driving force in the government security market, and Actcom’s conversance with the directive vital to the growth of the government division. Now, in addition to barrier, logical (information technology), physical security, and self-service delivery systems, Diebold can offer help to federal entities needing to meet the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in response to HSPD-12. A FIPS 201 solution provided by Actcom will demonstrate compliance with HSPD-12 standards for the access-control and ID card common to employees and contractors at facilities across the entire federal administrative structure. Given Diebold’s early lead in this marketplace, the company is well positioned to ensure preservation of all the legacy systems within the federal bureaucracy during incorporation of the new post-9/11 credentialing standards.

Diebold’s military commitment is extensive, covering everything from mainframes, routers, printers, safes, file cabinets, enclosures for documents, containers for weapons, soundproof doors — all GSA-certified — through network protection and monitoring services. A not untypical assignment involved equipage and security for some thirty-five vaults in Fort Bliss, Texas. A particularly noteworthy Diebold solution - “for the demanding customer,” notes Stroia — is LINX Predator Elite, the integrative command-and-control system that the company plausibly claims to be the best (though not the biggest) in military use. LINX, which gathers and evaluates information from various sensors, that is, ground-control radar, is the only solution certified by the U.S. Air Force for use in nuclear weapons storage. As with most Diebold systems it was designed and developed by the company but incorporates inputs from others. “We’re a hardware maker as well as an integrator and we created the core of LINX ourselves, to strict Air Force standards,” said John Stroia. “But everyone else in the field is either a partner or a competitor of ours and we know the integration market. If a superb product is available off-the-shelf we’ll use it, after thorough testing at our labs in Ohio. We have a thousand Diebold engineers worldwide, so nothing that doesn’t belong there makes it into one of our products.”

A company whose résumé includes security for the Hope Diamond and the Declaration of Independence — on public display in Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia, respectively — is worth listening to on the challenges faced by the industry. John Stroia pointed to the need for more IT-based solutions, an especially acute concern for those security companies serving the military. In his view, the biggest obstacle to development is presented by current limits on internal network infrastructure. LINX may be the most comprehensive system in use today, but network size is a limiting factor. If this or any other system is to be of greater utility — say, able to deliver any video, from every source, at all times — this constraint must be overcome. As to what may be poised to become the next big development in the industry, Stroia nominates video analytics, already in use by Diebold for large networks. This technology, whereby video becomes an information-analyzing device, triggering an alarm, “brings efficiency to the monitoring of video,” according to Stroia, who foresees rapid progression in the technique from object-detection (suitcase left behind) through people-counting (we have an infiltrator) to “individual moving in a suspicious manner.”

For Diebold, the next step will be to cultivate an intermarket in military applications, combining and re-combining its proven systems and integrating them into customer-driven solutions. These objectives fit Diebold’s definition of its products: emerging technologies for a converging world. They also harmonize well with the declared initiatives of the SIA, which recently elected John Stroia to its board of directors.

For more information, visit the company’s Web site.