Security organizations today have more information at their disposal than ever before. Cameras, access control, alarms, emergency notification systems, and AI-powered analytics can all alert teams when something requires attention. But during a critical incident, awareness is only useful if it leads to action.
In our recent webinar, Beyond Detection: Building Automated Security Workflows That Actually Work, Omnilert’s co-founder Ara Bagdasarian and Director of Product and Partner Enablement Eric Polovich explored what happens after a threat is identified, and why the connections between detection, verification, communication, and response can be just as important as to building a coordinated security response.
The discussion centered on a simple framework for building a more coordinated security response: Detect → Verify → Act.
The Modern Security Challenge: Plenty of Awareness, Not Enough Coordination
The webinar began with Bagdasarian and Polovich establishing that most organizations aren’t starting from scratch when it comes to physical security.
They already have cameras. They have access control. They may also have alarm systems, emergency notification platforms, monitoring centers, mobile applications, and other specialized security tools. And individually, those technologies work great.
The problem is that they were most likely all purchased at different times, from different vendors, and for different purposes. As a result, valuable information is fragmented across multiple systems and teams.
When an incident occurs, one platform may generate an alert. Another will be displaying the video. The facilities team might be in charge of securing the entrances. Someone else is responsible for sending emergency notifications, and another person may have the authority to call first responders. The information is all there, but the response still depends on people manually moving it from one system or person to the next. That’s where time can be lost.
Detection Is the Trigger, Not the Outcome
The security industry has gotten very good at detecting things:
- A camera can see activity.
- A panic button can trigger an alarm.
- Access control can flag an unexpected event.
- AI-powered gun detection can spot a visible firearm.
Each of those creates awareness that something needs attention. But awareness itself doesn’t lock a door, notify staff, activate an emergency response plan, or dispatch responders. Detection should be thought of as the trigger for an end-to-end security workflow that supports a faster, more coordinated security response.
Once something has been detected, an organization may need to verify the event, determine its severity, notify the right people, lock doors, activate alarms, send emergency communications, call first responders, and share information as the incident unfolds.
Some of those happen sequentially. Some happen in parallel. All are time-critical. So, the question security leaders should be asking isn’t just “How do we detect a threat?” It’s also “What happens next?”
Polovich proposed a simple framework to break this process down: Detect, Verify, and Act.
Detect: Extend Human Awareness with Technology
The first stage of the framework is detection.
A trigger can come from many places: AI-powered video analytics, a panic button, access control, a security officer, a 911 call, or someone observing suspicious behavior. In the case of AI-powered gun detection, technology can act as a “force multiplier” for security teams.
Organizations may have hundreds or thousands of cameras and sensors, but they cannot reasonably ask people to watch every camera continuously. AI can help monitor those camera feeds simultaneously and surface potentially important events for human attention.
Instead of relying on an operator to happen to be watching the right camera at exactly the right moment, technology can extend that person’s awareness across a much larger environment.
That becomes particularly valuable when organizations can detect threats earlier in the incident timeline, including around parking lots, walkways, perimeters, and other exterior areas. Both Bagdasarian and Polovich agreed that the earlier a threat is detected, the more opportunity is created to begin the response before that threat reaches its intended destination.
But AI identifying something important does not mean AI should make the final operational decision. That’s where verification comes in.
Verify: Turn Information into Understanding
Verification is sometimes discussed as if it were unique to AI, but the webinar made an important distinction: verification is really about operational judgment.
Someone has to understand what is happening, apply context, determine how serious the situation is, and decide what should happen next.
Bagdasarian gave the example of a school environment: A camera may detect what appears to be a firearm, but context matters. It could be a prop being used in a theater production. Likewise, a firearm carried by a police officer or SRO should not necessarily generate the same response as an armed individual approaching a school.
AI can efficiently surface the event. A human can interpret its meaning. This human-in-the-loop approach combines the speed and scale of technology with the contextual understanding of a person who can make an informed decision.
The goal isn’t to automate judgment. It’s to give the person making that judgment the right information, as quickly as possible.
Act: Turn the Emergency Plan into a Coordinated Security Response
Once a threat has been verified and a decision has been made, the next challenge is putting the response plan into action and creating a coordinated security response.
Most organizations already have an emergency operations plan. It may exist as a binder, checklist, standard operating procedure, or digital document outlining what should happen during different emergencies. The problem is, Polovich noted, that during an actual incident, somebody still has to execute those steps.
As Bagdasarian explained, the opportunity is to take those passive plans off the shelf and turn them into actionable workflows. Once the appropriate human decision has been made, automation can execute predefined actions immediately. That could mean:
- Locking or controlling doors
- Activating alarms
- Sending emergency notifications
- Alerting security personnel
- Creating incidents within a video management system
- Sharing critical information with key stakeholders
- Escalating to first responders
And critically, these actions don’t necessarily need to happen one after another. With an integrated workflow, multiple parts of the response can begin at the same time.
Automation Doesn’t Replace the Decision — It Executes It
One of the key distinctions Polovich made was this: “We’re not automating judgment. When the decision is made, automation executes.”
At the end of the day, security workflow automation is not intended to remove people from security decisions. Instead, once someone has reviewed the intelligence and decided action is required, technology can execute the pre-defined response without someone having to manually trigger every step.
To break this down even more, Polovich used an example from a conversation he had with a security chief nearly 20 years ago who wanted a “big, red button” on his desk. If an emergency happened, he wanted to press that button and have things start happening: messages sent, systems activated, people mobilized.
Today, we can take that idea much further. The “button” can be the event itself: A threat is detected, a person verifies it and makes the decision, and then the pre-defined workflow starts. When a response plan has already been defined, teams don’t have to invent it in the middle of an emergency.
Where Security Workflows Lose Time
The webinar proposed a helpful exercise for security teams: look at the transitions between stages of their existing response. The idea behind this is that friction often appears, not within an individual technology, but between systems, people, and processes.
A threat may be detected, but someone might still have to find the corresponding camera and gather the information needed to understand it. Once the situation is understood, someone may need to find the person with authority to initiate a lockdown or evacuation, and others will have to send the notification, lock the doors, or contact security. Then, as the situation changes, updated information has to reach everyone involved.
Each individual step makes sense. But every handoff introduces another opportunity for delay.
Integration and automation can help remove some of that friction, creating a more coordinated security response by moving information systematically from detection to verification and, following a human decision, triggering predefined actions without unnecessary manual handoffs.
Making the Systems You Already Have Work Together
An overarching theme of the webinar was that improving security workflows doesn’t necessarily mean replacing existing technology.
In most organizations, the physical security environment is already an ecosystem made up of technology from multiple vendors. Cameras may come from one provider, access control from another, and emergency notification from another. That’s not necessarily a problem.
The important question is whether those systems can exchange enough information to initiate the next action. As Polovich suggested, organizations evaluating security technology should ask vendors more than: “What does this product do?” They should also ask: “What can this product trigger, and what can trigger it?”
Modern security systems may offer APIs, webhooks, plugins, event engines, and other integration capabilities that allow separate technologies to participate in the same response workflow. The objective of integration isn’t necessarily to put every security function on one screen; it’s making sure systems can work together when it matters.
Why an Open Security Ecosystem Matters
An effective security workflow shouldn’t require every component to come from the same vendor. A closed platform can require organizations to design their processes around the capabilities and limitations of a particular vendor. Adding a new technology or replacing an existing component can potentially affect everything connected to it.
An open ecosystem turns that relationship around.
Organizations can preserve investments that already work, select the appropriate technology for each part of their environment, and connect those systems around the response process they want to execute.
Your cameras don’t necessarily need to come from the same company as your access control system, and your emergency notification platform doesn’t have to be the same technology used by your security operations center. They simply need to work together.
The goal should be for technology to adapt to the response plan — not for the response plan to adapt to the technology.
From Notification to Collaboration
Automation can get a response moving quickly, but an incident doesn’t end when the first alerts are sent. People still need to manage the situation as it evolves.
A mass notification platform may be able to send information to thousands of people in seconds. Collaboration requires the people actively managing the incident to share a common understanding of what’s happening:
- Where was the incident detected?
- Has the threat moved?
- What actions have already been taken?
- What information do first responders have?
- What has changed since the initial alert?
When the initial response has already been put into motion through automation, security teams can spend less of those critical early moments determining who needs to make a call or activate a system.
Instead, they can focus on managing the incident and keeping everyone aligned as conditions change.
Start by Mapping Your Existing Security Workflow
Organizations don’t need to wait for an emergency to discover where their security workflow breaks down.
Start by mapping the process today: How is a threat detected? Where does the information go? Who verifies it? Who has the authority to make a decision? Which actions happen next? Which steps require someone to switch systems, make a phone call, or manually trigger another platform?
Those handoffs are where organizations can begin looking for opportunities to reduce friction. Reducing those gaps can help create a more coordinated security response, where information moves quickly from detection to decision and action. The objective isn’t necessarily to add another security product. It’s to make sure the technology, people, and procedures already in place can work together when they’re needed most.
Watch the full on-demand webinar, Beyond Detection: Building Automated Security Workflows That Actually Work, to learn how to connect detection, human verification, automation, and your existing security technologies into a faster, more coordinated response.
