AUCSO forges security benchmarking partnership with ISARR

The partnership builds upon the existing relationship between AUCSO and ISARR (which has been a leading sponsor of AUCSO for the past four years). With ISARR’s significant customer presence in the higher education sector and AUCSO’s extensive membership base, this collaboration is set to make a substantial impact and represents a significant step towards strengthening security, safety and resilience in the universities landscape.

AUCSO’s desire to add value for its members and the sector as a whole, in turn boosting its position as a highly influential organisation across the broader higher education sector, underpins the union. AUCSO and ISARR recognised the immense value to AUSCO members of gathering benchmarking data that affords a view of the current landscape of universities in terms of their size, the scope of security teams, the use of technology, training and also areas of responsibility.

As the leading organisation for security professionals working in higher and further education around the world, AUCSO is continually looking to further enhance security within the higher education sector as a whole.

Two-stage development

Development of the benchmarking portal will be carried out in two stages.

Launching this month, Stage One will involve a comparator of all member universities to gain a baseline understanding of key 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 and the scope of services offered.

Stage Two is to be launched to AUCSO membership across the world later in the year following consultation with the wider membership. It 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 on a daily basis. This data will be used to further analyse and understand the drivers and occurrence patterns across the higher and further education sectors’ security landscape.

Valuable resources and support

Julie Barker, chief operating officer at AUCSO, stated: “This is an exciting development for the sector. We’re delighted to be leading the way together with ISARR. By partnering with ISARR, we are going to continue to achieve our mission of providing valuable resources and support for our members.”

Barker added: “ISAAR is a leading technology company specialising in risk, resilience and security. There’s a mutual realisation that we could work together on this exciting project. This collaboration will 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 we serve.”

AUCSO chair Oliver Curran noted: “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, enhance efficiency, evaluate performance and mitigate risks. Further, it assists with strategic decision-making.”

Adrian Dennehy, regional chair of AUCSO who has been working on this project, observed: “The results will be presented at the AUCSO Conference in April when we are planning a session that also encompasses discussion on any other areas of interest that we can include going forward. These additions will then be incorporated into future years’ data-gathering.”

Russ Huxtable, head of advisory at ISARR, informed Security Matters: “We are proud to be working with AUCSO and determined to 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.”