"We had to find a way to generate as much information as possible, fuse it, correlate it and bring it into one location," explained Barani. "We took two products--event management and identity management products from and --and developed an integration between them with a single rules-development driver. This way we can correlate information from the event and the identity and have a better situational awareness."

Barani explains that the identity management piece might come into play if, for example, an employee's access card is stolen or lost. If someone steals a card and is trying to get into a critical area, such as a closet containing sensitive assets, a central chiller plant, or a critical electrical area, it will generate a single alarm. But if there are multiple attempts made using that card, it will be flagged by the system because it does not clear a threshold of acceptability.

"We will know someone is trying to access critical areas at different locations," says Barani. "Then we bring in the identity management portion of it and see if the person we observe through the CCTV is actually the one using the card. If it's not, we have a law enforcement situation. If it is someone with access and they are trying to probe certain areas, we also know how to respond."

The access card example is a simple scenario, but the situational awareness system would also be critical in the event of a large-scale or, as Barani refers to it, a Mumbai-style attack: a scenario involving several attackers trying to harm people and buildings.

"In a dynamic situation with multiple attackers and responding agencies, we need to know where the good guys are, where the bad guys are, and what they are doing. With this system, we have immediate access to information like where attackers are located through multiple access control and CCTV systems. We'll have access to information from the BMS system and HVAC system to tell fire department representatives that this is status of the fire, these are the points of alarm, and this is the area where the fire suppression system has deployed, these are the floor plans of where the fire is, this is the floor above and below, this is the status of the stair pressurization, this is what the elevator system is doing, here's what the evacuation looks like in lobby."