The Association of University Chief Security Officers (AUCSO) has announced a partnership with ISARR, a bespoke risk, resilience, and security management solution, to gather benchmarking information for its members.
The partnership builds upon a relationship between AUCSO and ISARR (which has been a sponsor of AUCSO for the past four years). With ISARR’s customer presence in the Higher Education sector and AUCSO’s membership base, this partnership was born from AUCSO’s desire to add value to its members and the sector as a whole, the association says.
Development of the portal will be carried out in two stages. Stage One, which will be launched early February 2024, will involve a comparator of all member universities to gain a baseline understanding of differences between them. This will include factors such as university size, region, country, location characteristics, student make-up, the role and structure of security teams as well as scope of services offered.
Stage two, which will be launched to AUCSO members later in the year after consultation with the wider membership, will involve the collection of key operational data. This will include incident statistics data from which there will be the ability to drill down and understand more detail including data on the problems, issues and incidents that security teams within universities are dealing with. This data will be used to further analyse and understand the drivers and occurrence patterns across the Higher and Further Education sector’s security landscape.
AUCSO Chief Operating Officer Julie Barker, pictured, said: “By partnering with ISARR we are going to continue to achieve our mission of providing valuable resources and support to our members. ISAAR is a leading technology company specialising in risk, resilience and security and so there was a mutual realisation that we could work together on this exciting project.
“This collaboration will not only benefit and give value to all of our members and our wider communities as well as the Higher and Further Education sectors as a whole – it’s another important step forward in ensuring we safeguard and support our students and the wider communities that we serve.”
Chair of AUCSO, Oliver Curran, AUCSO added: “We believe the outputs of this project will bring huge value to our members. Benchmarking within security associations is imperative, as it allows us to continuously improve, identify good practices, optimise resource allocations, improve efficiency, evaluate performance, mitigate risks and helps with strategic decision making.”
Adrian Dennehy, of Cardiff Met University, Welsh Regional Chair of AUCSO, has been working on this project. He said: “The results will be presented at the AUCSO Conference in April when we are planning a session looking at the initial results and discussing any other areas of interest that we can include going forward. These additions will then be incorporated into future years’ data-gathering.”
ISARR Head of Advisory Russ Huxtable added: “We are proud to be working with AUCSO to develop this program and positively impact the Higher Education sector. Our expertise in this specialised area combined with AUCSO’s membership base and influence will undoubtedly lead to significant improvements in security measures.”
AUCSO’s 40th Annual Conference will run at the University of Liverpool from April 8 to 10.
