When you’re protecting your buildings, the first line of defense is detracting intruders. That means enhancing the security of your building, hence hardening the target, to help prevent attacks and deter penetration of your defenses. This could be from the external view of the property to the internal infrastructure.
The key is in understanding the type of threat the building could encounter, including internal and external challenges. This process uses a threat assessment to determine natural surveillance, access control, reinforcement and maintenance to formulate an effective plan.
What is Target Hardening?
Target hardening is enhancing the security of a building or facility by deterring and delaying threats from penetrating your defenses. This begins with a threat and vulnerability assessment that analyzes five factors: existence, capability, history, intention and targeting.
This assessment pinpoints building weaknesses and lack of redundancy to determine corrective actions that will reduce vulnerability. From how to protect employees of different volumes to implementing controlled access, every area is evaluated and assessed.
Threat and Vulnerabilty Assessments
Threat and vulnerability assessments identify risks, vulnerabilities and threats of a building and organization.
This includes the most frequent types of threats, which are intentional, where the perpetrator knows what they are doing and is trying to access sensitive information; accidental, where an employee may have broken protocol; natural, when information is compromised due to natural disasters; and internal, where employees are knowingly abusing their access in order to hurt the company.
In order to successfully complete an threat and vulnerability assessment to harden the target, five steps must take place:
- Determining the scope of the threat assessment - This helps create an outline of what areas are covered and which ones aren’t.
- Gathering the data needed to cover the scope of the assessment - This data may include all policies and procedures, any governing regulations, and interviews with key personnel who can provide information needed.
- Identifying potential vulnerabilities - The data can assist in identifying any potential vulnerabilities in the current infrastructure. A penetration test should also be conducted to help detect those vulnerabilities that pose the biggest threats.
- Analyzing those vulnerabilities and rating them - These threats are analyzed by ratings: minor severity and exposure, moderate severity and exposure, and high severity and exposure.
- Performing the threat analysis - The findings will help develop a strategy to remove current threats and mitigate future ones, creating critical infrastructure security tactics that work.
Contact Kontek Industries For Target Hardening Solutions
The team at Kontek Industries has extensive experience in providing critical infrastructure assessments to ensure buildings have the best security protocols in place. Our custom manufactured products of vehicle bollards, vehicle barriers and ballistic glass helps secure buildings while implementing target hardening protocols.
