Many organizations still run physical security and cybersecurity as separate departments, with separate budgets, separate leadership, and separate incident response plans. That structure made sense when a stolen badge and a stolen password were unrelated problems. It makes less sense today. A 2021 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report found that 85 percent of cybersecurity breaches involved a human element, including exposure to insider threats and physical breaches, a statistic Deloitte has pointed to as the core argument for why physical security programs need to be built with cybersecurity in mind from the start, not bolted on afterward.
The pandemic accelerated the case for convergence. Once organizations shifted to hybrid and remote work, the boundary between the physical workplace and the private home dissolved. Security teams had to protect people, assets, and information across both.
The data on where organizations stand now is encouraging. Genetec’s 2026 State of Physical Security Report found that more than 70 percent of respondents are now using unified or integrated security systems, and 60 percent cited the ability to integrate new capabilities as their main reason for replacing legacy technology. That is real progress on the technology side. But integrating platforms is not the same as converging programs. ASIS Foundation research defines security convergence as getting security and risk management functions to work together seamlessly, an organizational and cultural challenge as much as a technical one.
A real blueprint for convergence starts with governance. It means a shared risk register between physical and information security leadership, joint incident response protocols that do not stall at the handoff between teams, and a single point of accountability when a physical vulnerability, an unbadged visitor, an unsecured server closet, an unpatched building automation system, becomes a cyber incident, and vice versa.
The organizations that get this right are not the ones with the most integrated software. They are the ones that have stopped treating physical and cyber risk as two different conversations.