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Chartered Security Professionals

The Role of a 21st

Century Corporate

Security & Risk Manager

By Paul Kellett CSyP MSyI

The role of a 21st Century Corporate Security & Risk manager in Ireland has evolved at an exponential
rate over the past 25 years. No longer is security management restricted to the indigenous small and
medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and solely concerned about tangible assets surrounded by high
walls and gates.

Data is the new asset to be protected. Dublin has taken over from London as Europe’s largest data
hosting cluster, capturing 25 per cent of the European market, more than €1 billion was spent on data
centres in Ireland during 2018 (Reddan, 2019).

The challenges faced by global Corporate Security & Risk managers during this growth have become
very complex as the threats that organisations are exposed to, such as cyber-attacks, require greater
depth of knowledge and awareness of the external vectors that may pose a threat. Greater physical
and technical security strategies must be embedded into the organisation’s security posture to
combat the myriad of emerging risks.

An effective tool of strategic planning to examine the strengths and weaknesses (internal matters)
and opportunities and threats (external matters) of the organisation is a SWOT analysis (Syazwan Ab
Talib and Bakar Abdul Hamid, 2014). To effectively meet the challenges of the macro environment to
the corporate organisation, SWOT analyses should be carried out in regular intervals. In conjunction
with the SWOT analysis, another very effective tool of strategic planning is the PESTLE analysis, which
examines the Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Legal and Environmental factors that may
directly or indirectly affect the organisation.

As advances in technology have made physical security strategies data/intelligence driven, 21st
Century Corporate Security & Risk managers have embraced education, more so than their
predecessors. The availability and ease of access to academic and professional courses have
expanded the skillsets and paradigms of security professionals whereby they now provide security
that is strategically congruent and inter-dependant with the organisation’s business strategy. The
syllabus of security management training and education has also evolved to combat the nature of
current and future threats to include risk management, crisis management and business continuity.
Greater breadth of knowledge and more holistic paradigms are essential to mitigate against all forms
of threat. For example, when you examine the 9/11 attacks in 2011, the subsequent report cited
“imagination” as one of the four failures that led to the attack. The report found that America was
taken by surprise when you consider the attack was “carried out by a tiny group of people, not enough
to man a full platoon. Measured on a governmental scale, the resources behind it were trivial. The
group itself was dispatched by an organization based in one of the poorest, most remote, and least
industrialised countries on earth” (Kean TH, Hamilton L.,2011).

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