Houston ready to kick off Secured Cities 2016

In just two weeks, the 8th edition of the Secured Cities conference is being held in Houston, Texas (November 15 – 17, 2016).

Recognized as the largest and only conference dedicated to the public/private partnership initiatives in the public safety and emergency management sectors, Secured Cities delivers a unique blend of peer-to-peer learning on hands-on experience.

Coordinating efforts among public and private municipal stakeholders allows for a cohesive security and risk mitigation plan. That is the mantra of Secured Cities, the only content-driven national conference providing an interactive forum for public safety, law enforcement, and management-level security personnel – both public and private – to address trending topics relevant to securing municipal, educational, and healthcare and transportation sectors.

I’ll be there to talk about Avoiding the Six Major Pitfalls of Advanced Technology Planning, Selection and Deployment, on Wednesday morning at 10 a.m.

My session will revolve around how technology advancements have significantly increased security capabilities—but not without significant challenges. Most tried-and-true rules regarding technology and vendor selection no longer apply. For decades we have crafted RFPs requiring candidate technologies to have proven themselves in similar deployments for a minimum of five years. Today, that’s asking for outdated technology!

How do you design an access control system when your personnel want to use their own biometric readers (smartphones) – will that save you money or cost you big time? How do you reconcile one-time grant funding with cloud-based technology subscriptions?  How do you calibrate forensic video quality requirements when an internet video clip could spark days of civil unrest? What’s the cost/benefit analysis look like? What does “future-proof” mean in an era of accelerating technology advancement? Will your collection of advanced analytics data about people and activity have privacy rights implications? How fast will your technology become insufficient or obsolete? Will threat trends outpace your technology capabilities? How would you manage the integration of cloud-based systems and services? What will cybersecurity for my technology look like?

This session will cover all of these questions and more. It will also show how to evaluate the potential good and bad impacts of both technology trends and threat trends in your security technology planning. Specific sources of practical guidance will be provided.

But this is just one of the more than 46 sessions and panel discussions on tap in Houston. So if your security or public safety work is for a city or county, or you work in healthcare, education, transit, public events or entertainment—you will find plenty of insights and information to bring home, along with extensive opportunities for peer interaction.

Here are some of the topics (not session titles) that will be addressed.

Lessons from the trenches:

• Getting a complete after-action report based on data and analytics
• How body cameras can enhance your officer training program
• How to take advantage of video analytics metadata
• Lessons learned from 500 incident response cases
• Case study material on successful security funding (several sessions)

Technology insights:

• What does “future-proof” mean in an era of accelerating technology advancement?
• IoT and science guidelines from the US Department of Homeland Security regarding security, surveillance and safety operations
• Combining technologies for improved analytics results
• Improved watchfulness through machine learning and real-time data mining
• The contributions of industrial control systems to security monitoring
• The difference technology standards can make today

Other good perspectives:

• Hardening “soft targets”
• Investigating network intrusions
• Effective city crime-fighting strategies

This is a very good conference for in-depth discussions in between the key sessions that you want to attend. There will also be two days to explore the latest in technology with more than 50 sponsors showcasing their solutions on the floor.

I hope to see you there! To register, go to www.securedcities.com and join the conversation.