Interesting report and an increasingly mentioned trend:

The convergence of physical and information security might be likened to the early days of flight. While there have been some ambitious attempts at convergence by daredevil visionaries, as described in the case studies, progress, for the most part, has been slow and difficult. The truth remains that convergence, which is typically based on the vision of specific individuals rather than on a structured, well thought-out, repeatable model guided by a clear vision and road map, is still in its early stages.

For the visionaries of our case studies, there are some easy convergence wins in terms of efficiencies of scale gained by integrating information and physical security monitoring and video surveillance systems on a common organization network. But these advantages cater to technical people and are promoted by the security technology and communications companies of the world. The hard convergence wins ”the ones that will provide the largest benefit” require buy-in from senior executives. As it stands today, senior management typically sees security more as a tactical function than a necessary component of business processes or decision making.

When the authors talk about converged security in this publication, particularly as it relates to enterprise risk, they are talking about not only physical and information security, but also the wider areas of protection, including security responsibility found within human resources and crisis management as well as within businesses or operational lines of responsibility.