In all public as well as private sectors, when it comes to protecting today’s mission critical operations (Inter and IntraNet applications) everyone from the presidents on down is proclaiming their demand for “greater security”. And as such the masses are responding in kind with every measure of security imaginable except for the most obvious and most needed! Dig deeper into what people mean by “security”, examine the typical responses most often following this call and discover a narrow focus on only three of the four primary disciplines associated with the security industry (see Fig. 1.).

In reality, while addressing each of these disciplines is entirely essential to achieving complete security, ignoring the most basic component of mission critical security, Structural Security (see Fig. 2.), renders this objective completely impossible.

Both public and private ventures alike invest heavily in an Information Technology (IT) infrastructure that includes software, hardware, network design, engineering, and equipment; spend enormous sums of money into “securing” this infrastructure with essential Physical, Operational, and Logical Security measures; and then, once this immensely vital expense into the entity’s survival is made, the operation itself, the life ensuring “brain” of the business/agency, is placed in the most precarious of locations – in basements under kitchens, in first floor, window walled, highly trafficked buildings, in flood zones, in front of railroad tracks, down the road from a chemical plant, in rooms that share the walls of public corridors, etc. The “thought” as to where the mission critical operation is located or how the facility is to be built is at very best, in most cases, an afterthought.

A functioning Information Protection Plan (IPP) incorporates all measures associated with each discipline – Physical, Operational, Logical, and Structural Security to the fullest extent, not as a matter of consideration but as an imperative to the availability of a mission critical operation and to the absolute survival of the entity itself.