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Facility Design Transcription

Welcome to our Secure Site and Facility Design module on Location, Layout, and CPTED. There are several factors that you should consider when deciding on a location for a facility. You should consider the location based on the area. You may have different types of natural disasters that you have to worry about.

And you should also consider how close you are to highways, airports, military bases, and other services. What type of hazards do you have in this location? Joint tenants could be a problem, because they have access to the building, and may be able to access your space without your knowledge.

You could also have vandalism and burglaries, if you are in a high crime area. You want to make sure that you're close to outside assistance, like police, fire, and ambulance services, and other public services that you may need to access. You should also consider visibility, whether or not you want a line of sight from the street to your building.

Whether you want customers to be able to see your building, or if you're trying to keep a low profile. And you should also consider markings, whether or not you're going to have signs on the building to describe your company. Or, if you're trying to keep the company's location quiet, you may not want to have any signs on the building.

It is important to have physical security controls in place to protect the lives of your employees and visitors. And also maintain your operation, your information systems, and your architecture, such as your building and your systems, against any threats from the physical environment. When you are designing your building and selecting a location, you should obtain a holistic view of the site so that you can be sure you're choosing the correct location, not only for your employees but also for your operations.

You should make sure that your building is not located in a flood plain, and also do not place your facility in tornado or hurricane prone areas, if possible. You should attempt to find the best balance of convenience, utility, accessibility, cost, and security. And you should plan for any physical risks by using a defense in-depth strategy, with multiple layers of protection.

You should also choose construction material based on any threats that you may face in the area, while also making sure that you comply with fire codes and building codes in your location. Here we have an example of a well designed site with multiple layers of protection designed to protect your critical assets.

We can see that the highest security zone is at the center, our data center, and our most secure assets are kept inside, and it will be much harder to get to them. In order to protect the building from outside threats, we have well lit areas. We have security guards and surveillance cameras.

And we also have bollards in the form of planters to prevent the building from any ramming attacks, where someone might try to drive their vehicle into the building. When designing your facility, you can use a layered perimeter security approach. You can work with any natural boundaries that you may have near the facility, such as cliffs, woods, beaches, or bodies of water.

In urban areas, you can use streets, and buildings, and maybe even underground access. And you can work with any co-tenants that you have in order to protect both company's assets. You can also use landscaping to make your facility more desirable, and also to deter individuals from attempting to access your facility without authorization.

Landscaping can help to direct people, animals, and vehicles into or away from your facility as necessary. You can use ditches, mounds, boulders, and ponds to keep vehicles from driving towards the facility. You can use hedges, cactuses, trees, and planters to keep animals or vehicles off the property. You can use curving driveways to reduce the speed of vehicles as they approach, making it more difficult for vehicles to ram the building.

And if you make your site less appealing to an intruder, you're also making it more appealing to your staff, and making them want to spend more time at your location. Crime prevention through environmental design, or CPTED, is a method of using your environment to reduce the fear of crime, reduce the amount of crime that occurs, and improve the quality of life for your employees.

You can use natural surveillance with good visibility, which will make intruders feel as though they may be detected and apprehended if they approach your facility. So they will look for an easier target somewhere else. Natural access controls can also limit crime from occurring by taking steps to differentiate between your public and private space.

For example, you can use boulders and trees instead of bollards to keep individuals and vehicles out of certain areas, but it looks much more appealing. Also, territorial reinforcement will occur when users feel at home they will be more likely to try to protect their area, as it is their home domain.

You should be familiar with the term CPTED for the CISSP examination. This concludes our secure site and facility design module. Thank you for watching.