It was not so long ago that corporate social responsibility (CSR) was the exclusive program for a corporation to demonstrate its community bona fides. Today, CSR’s scope looks extremely limited next to ESG (environment, social, governance).
Sustainability has become a colossal influence on business decisions, with nearly two thirds of organizations around the world now considering it when upgrading their systems, according to a recent study by HID. The result of interviews with more than 1,200 enterprise decision-makers around the world, our State of Physical Access Trend Report identified five main trends in physical security. One of them was a brisk movement towards the alignment of security decisions with environmental goals.
Where security leaders used to focus purely on risk mitigation, increasingly they are consulting other stakeholders before upgrading or replacing systems. Some 63% of respondents in our survey said sustainability officers have some degree of influence when it comes to upgrading physical access control systems.
Some 15% reported that the company’s sustainability goals were a major influence on the decision to upgrade their organization’s physical access control solution. Energy-saving solutions emerged as one of the top three trends shaping the access control industry, cited by around one in seven (14%) executives.
Sustainability has been pushing its way to the top of the corporate agenda for some time now. Some of the world’s largest companies are coming to terms with the fact that the next generations of consumers are linking brand reputation to a broader spectrum of behaviors than just the viability, availability, and price of goods and services. In the US, more than 90% of S&P 500 companies and 70% of Russell 1000 companies now publish ESG reports.
According to an October 2023 ESG Monitor 12-nation survey led by SEC Newgate, 86% of UAE respondents rated their interest in ESG issues as “high” and more than 90% believe private enterprises must prioritize such issues. The changing attitudes of the public are rippling across industries to corporate procurement teams, many of which want suppliers to be more transparent about operations, product sourcing, and R&D practices. This is because businesses are listening to their customers. HID’s survey found 87% of respondents ranking sustainability as “important to extremely important” to their customers.
So, the rise of ESG is making businesses take a thoughtful look along their supply chains in both directions. But in recognition of the fact that they too are a link in the chain, organizations are looking inward to their own direct contribution. Sustainability is, for instance, strongly linked to the reduction of plastic.
When this is applied to physical security, bamboo cards offer an exotic alternative, but they are less practical than mobile credentials. Mobile-device access solutions satisfy the need of eco-friendliness, but they are also convenient to increasingly digital-native employees who tend not to go anywhere without their smartphones.
Physical security is already undergoing significant digital transformation across the Middle East as organizations from all industries try to wring maximum value out of their cloud migrations. Mobile credentials hosted in e-wallets offer all the benefits of plastic-card systems, and some others besides – easily issued, easily replaced, easily rescinded, and so on. Such solutions deserve a place at the table in our ESG future – an inclusive future that is cleaner, more just, and more prosperous.
By Sam Cherif, Senior Director & Head of the Middle East at HID
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