Service
Physical Security Assessment
A site survey against the obligations you actually carry.
Assessment of a site against its real threat picture and the standards that bind you, with findings ordered by what to fix first rather than by what is easiest to write up.
Suited to a lease decision, a board request, an insurer question, or the year before an audit.
The assessment is conducted on site and against the site as it runs, not as the plans describe it. That means the doors people actually prop, the after hours arrangement rather than the business hours one, the keys held by contractors who left, and the cameras pointed where they were pointed on the day they were installed.
Findings are graded on what a failure would cost you and how easily it could be caused, not on a generic severity scale. Two sites with identical gaps do not carry identical risk, and a report that pretends otherwise is a template rather than an assessment.
Each recommendation carries what closing it involves: procedural, physical or contractual, so the report can be worked through by whoever holds the budget rather than requiring the consultant to interpret it. Empire will also say where the honest answer is that a gap is acceptable given what it would cost to close.
Common questions
What does a physical security assessment cover?
The site as it actually operates: perimeter and approach, access control and who holds it, surveillance coverage and its blind spots, alarm and response arrangements, key and lock management, and the procedures people follow rather than the ones written down.
How is this different from a security audit?
An audit measures you against a standard and reports compliance. An assessment starts from what would actually go wrong here and what it would cost you, then measures against the obligations that genuinely bind you. An audit tells you whether you passed; an assessment tells you what to fix first.
What do we receive at the end?
A written report: what was examined, what was found, what could not be examined and why, and recommendations ordered by priority rather than by ease of writing. The section people skip is the third: the areas not covered are the areas your assurance does not extend to.
How long does an assessment take?
It follows the site. A single tenancy is a different job from a campus or a facility operating around the clock. Empire scopes it against the site you nominate and says before starting what is and is not included.
When is the right time to commission one?
Before a lease decision, when a board or an insurer has asked a question you cannot currently answer, after an incident or a near miss, or the year before an audit rather than the month before it: a finding you have had twelve months to close reads very differently from one you have had four weeks to close.
Check this against the source
Everything on this page describes a regulated activity. These are the bodies that set the rules, so you can read them rather than take Empire’s word for it.
- Australia's Strategy for Protecting Crowded Places from Terrorism Australian Government
- Australian Security Industry Association ASIAL
Insights
Empire Executive Protection Pty Ltd · ABN 30 622 627 034 · trading as Empire Protection