2014 Digital Yearbook of Homeland Security Awards

GSN 2014 Digital Yearbook of Homeland Security Awards Recipients
GSN INTERVIEW
Scott Greiper, Distinguished Judge,
GSN 2014 Homeland Security Awards Program
Mr. Greiper is the President and Founding Partner of Secure Strategy Group (SSG), a boutique
advisory and investment banking platform in the physical and cyber security sectors. He has
had a distinguished 15-year career in the security and technology sectors as both a research
analyst and investment banker, and is known as a thought leader in the industry. Before
forming Secure Strategy Group, he was a Managing Director at Legend Merchant Group and
Head of the firm’s Convergent Security Group, which provided capital, strategic advisory and
M&A services to growth companies in the security and defense technology markets. Previously,
Mr. Greiper was a Principal and Senior Analyst at C. E. Unterberg, Towbin, where he covered public companies in the
Global Security industry and was consistently ranked as one of the top analysts in the sector. He has worked with a
range of industry leaders and is a frequent guest speaker and moderator at conferences and seminars across the country.
Mr. Greiper attended the Executive MBA program at Columbia University and holds a B. A. in Economics from The
University of Chicago. He is a member of the FBI InfraGard program, BENS (Business Executives for National Security),
ASIS (American Society for Industrial Security) and NYSSA (New York Society for Security Analysts).
GSN: What is the key trend you’re seeing in
the security industry as we enter 2015?
SG: The massive global security industry is being transformed
from “guns, guards and gates” into highly integrated
technology solutions that must protect against both
physical and cyber threats while at the same time demonstrating
ROI. The distinction between cyber and physical
security is blurring and the requirement for unified
management of threats in different domains growing. This
“unification” is in my mind the most important transformation
impacting the security industry.
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What is “Unified Security”? It is the growing integration
of security and resilience solutions – themselves
increasingly digital – across the full spectrum of requirements
and threats, from cyber to physical. It is the integration
of physical security solutions – surveillance, access
control, fire alarms – onto the same common operating
platform of cyber security solutions – anti-virus, intrusion
detection. This in an effort to create full situational awareness
of an organizations security systems and sensors, and
to more readily coordinate response.
More and more building automation systems,