Embracing Automation for Enhanced Cybersecurity and Workplace Safety
From the industrial industry to the digital revolution, innovation has always been the key to success in business. However, with technology advancing at breathtaking speed today, even the savviest of entrepreneurs can feel overwhelmed. But staying open to innovation isn’t as complicated as some make it out to be.
The current generation of automation technologies, for example, is both accessible and affordable — no matter how small or budget-constrained your business may be. Today’s savvy entrepreneurs have an unprecedented opportunity to harness the enormous capacity of automation to optimize business operations. It’s in the domains of cybersecurity and workplace safety that the full potential of automation may be realized.
Automating Digital Surveillance
Whether you’re operating a brick-and-mortar business or working in the digital domain, securing your business is a never-ending endeavor of the highest priority. It’s also an effort that must occur across multiple levels simultaneously, as you strive to protect your operations from both internal and external threats.
Automation enables entrepreneurs to continuously and comprehensively surveil their operations. This includes safeguarding its virtual and physical infrastructures as well as ensuring the integrity of the work product.
Document fraud, for instance, is a real and growing threat, particularly as companies increasingly rely on digital materials for storage and data collection. New and highly effective technologies are emerging to authenticate documents with both speed and accuracy. This includes the capacity to detect multiple types of fraudulent activities, from forged signatures to unauthorized use or modification of written materials.
Importantly, document authentication software is only one iteration of an enormous suite of automated technologies designed to secure and protect business materials. By installing and routinely updating security software on all devices, including mobile technologies, you can build a truly robust cybersecurity platform, no matter how small your business.
Automating Physical Surveillance
Automated surveillance doesn’t just involve the security and authenticity of business materials. It also includes the monitoring of the company’s physical and virtual spaces. Automating access to some or all of the business campus ensures your control of the physical space, enabling you to track and regulate who goes where and when.
Embedded authenticators, for example, can control access to digital content, secure databases, and protected cloud networks. They can also be keyed to doors and gates, allowing you to survey employees’ and clients’ comings and goings and even to remotely grant or withhold access permission. This maximizes your surveillance capacity while eliminating the need for a human guard stationed round-the-clock at each possible point of entry.
Automated lockout tagout programs such as these, combined with the installation and updating of a robust software security platform on all business devices offer multilayered security. Automating protection from the inside out and the outside in means that your business will enjoy a level of security that exceeds the physical capacity of human officers. And this allows you to divert your human resources to other essential work within your organization.
Automation and Workplace Safety
While automation is critical to physical and cybersecurity in your workplace, this is far from the only benefit. For example, the capacity for constant surveillance in today’s automation technologies can continuously monitor environmental conditions for safety. Sensors may be installed to detect hazardous air, water, and soil conditions. From there, they can dispatch automated alerts when threats arise. They may also be used to evaluate the functioning of equipment and systems and to alert human operators to existing or potential risks.
Above all, automated technologies, such as robots powered by artificial intelligence (AI), are proving highly effective in emergency response. These technologies can enter and work in spaces that would be too dangerous for humans, such as toxic spill sites, the grounds of a building collapse, and other disaster areas. The result is protection for employees, greater efficiency and effectiveness in disaster recovery, and improved speed and safety in victim rescue.
The Takeaway
Automation technologies are increasingly demonstrating their immense potential to maximize business performance across a multitude of domains. From dramatically accelerating employee productivity to supporting lean operations and eliminating operational redundancies, automation may well be the most potent weapon in the entrepreneur’s arsenal.
But these technologies are more than a luxury for tech-astute business persons who want to boost productivity and efficiency in their operations. By automating the surveillance and monitoring of work products, equipment, and physical and virtual spaces, you can thwart danger before it strikes and quickly stop the bleeding when a breach occurs or a mistake is made.
From the deployment of sensors to receive real-time alerts of dangerous changes in the environment to the use of predictive analytics to ensure the optimal performance of equipment and systems, automation is highly effective in promoting employees’ health and safety in the workplace. As long as you stay open-minded about any future uses of automation in your workplace safety regime, you’ll see your employees happier and your business more successful as a result.
