Below is an excerpt from a guest article in Security Technology Executive by Vidsys CEO James Chong.

How to Build A Customized GSOC For Your Organization

A key theme coming out of ISC West this year was clear – the GSOC. That’s short for Global Security Operations Center. But what does a GSOC really look like, and how can it truly help your organization?

A GSOC (pronounced “gee-sock”) is designed to empower security personnel with a platform that delivers ongoing prevention, detection, protection, and mitigation of threats to an organization’s virtual and physical assets. Through this process, the system can uncover vulnerable areas, respond to potential threats and address any virtual or physical incidents occurring within your environment.

While many proclaim the GSOC to be the future of security, companies often perceive an advanced operations center to be much too expensive to build and implement. However, through the proper planning and technology, companies can lower risk and increase operational efficiency and situational awareness without an exponential cost increase.

Here are four steps to creating a customized GSOC for your organization:

Define The Goals: In order to outline what you want the GSOC to achieve for your organization, you should interview its stakeholders about what they expect from the GSOC. The importance of involving everyone, from your executives to your IT department, depends on your organization’s size and the GSOC’s purpose. This is where your CSO can lead the charge in coordinating the integration of physical and IT assets in order to create a holistic picture of your organization’s infrastructure.

Next, assess what the goals of your operations center will be. For instance, one objective could be to improve loss prevention techniques through monitoring supply chain management and efficiency. Another goal might be to lower overall company risk through creating better identity management processes, or helping tie together video surveillance from multiple company locations so they can be accessed at anytime from anywhere. Create a list of all needs from your operations center first, and then prioritize these goals among your key stakeholders. The ultimate goal, of course, is to increase collaboration and preempt risk in order to respond more proactively and effectively to growing security threats in the enterprise landscape.

Take Inventory of Current Technology Assets: Instead of immediately instigating a “rip and replace” methodology, take your current technology assets into account. This includes everything from monitors to cameras and employee access to areas within the building. Map out your current security technology to see if anything can be leveraged and integrated better than it is currently. By surveying the current landscape, you will be able to identify the holes within your security strategy and directly address those first.

A converged security approach means combining and leveraging data from all sources within your company, including cameras, sensors, access control, building management, alarms, identity management and even social media. From there you will be able to extract actionable information that can positively impact your organization from a security and financial perspective…

See the full article on SecurityInfoWatch.com.