The roster of Visual Fusion users increasingly includes corporate security departments and agencies involved in homeland security or law enforcement.
"What's up with that?" I asked our resident expert, Nathan Banks. Our Director of Business Development, Nathan has experience managing and consulting on physical and operational security for some of the biggest companies in the world, including Microsoft.
"Two factors," he said. "The level of situational awareness you get by putting your feeds in context, and the ease of use. You don't need a lot of IT resources to add feeds to your Visual Fusion applications, and you can put your enterprise data in context against outside feeds."
Microsoft does exactly that at its Global Security Operations Centers. Using a Visual Fusion application that combines company data and external news feeds, operators monitor hundreds of facilities that employ thousands of employees. When a situation develops—whether it's an earthquake or a political upheaval—they can see instantly which company properties and employees might be affected. This Visual Fusion application also accepts feeds from thousands of security cameras and card readers in the company's building security systems, allowing workers to monitor access to Microsoft facilities around the world.
The ease with which you can add new feeds holds special appeal for many cash-strapped agencies and corporate security departments. These departments protect the people, buildings and more for the enterprise, but often have limited budgets. They seldom have first call on IT resources.
"A company's primary goal is to sell its product, not guard the warehouse," Nathan told me. "So it's not unusual for the security team to be 5-10 years behind the rest of the organization, in terms of the technology and resources they have available."
Visual Fusion fills this gap by enabling anyone to add feeds to an application without database management or programming experience.
Security teams typically have to deal with lots of legacy data—old databases, or data trapped in Excel files on someone's desktop. Adding this data to a Visual Fusion application can be as simple as uploading a spreadsheet to a SharePoint library and then dragging it into the application through VF's GUI interface. Need to connect to a database? VF supplies a variety of connectors that you enable through configuration files. Getting this data into a shared map allows collaboration and communication that was impossible before.
This combination of a single, interactive, map-based view with ease of use accounts for Visual Fusion's appeal to Microsoft, the New York Police Department, and multiple agencies involved in homeland security. It makes VF a unique addition to the arsenals of security professionals everywhere.
