The CSO’s New Requirement: Tools That Work Beyond the Guard Booth

The CSO’s New Requirement: Tools That Work Beyond the Guard Booth

At a recent industry event, David Fortino, head of corporate security at New York Blood Center Enterprises, put a question to the vendors in the room that should reframe how every security software provider thinks about their product roadmap:

“How are you going to make my life easier as a CSO? That is what I’m looking for from a vendor. I’m looking for a tool that will help the entire enterprise, not just physical security.”

That line appears in SIA’s 2026 Security Megatrends report, but it could just as easily have come from our own recent webinar, “From Badge to Boardroom,” with Todd Kreisher, a 27-year Secret Service veteran and former CSO of a global automotive manufacturer. Todd spent an hour with Jeff DiDomenico walking through exactly what Fortino is describing: what happens when a security incident stops being a security-only problem the moment it’s reported.

The incident that wasn’t a security incident

Early in the webinar, Todd told a story from his time as a manufacturing CSO. His team was running trailer inspections as part of a CTPAT compliance requirement, comparing bills of lading against actual loads. Through good incident reporting, he noticed something: trucks were turning around far more often than they should have been.

His words: “I also started to realize, that’s not really a security incident. I mean, it wasn’t a security topic, it was a business topic, it was a logistics topic.”

With that data in hand, Todd didn’t file it away in a security report nobody else would read. He took it to the logistics department and the executive team, and together they fixed the process, saving the company real money along the way.

That’s the whole argument in miniature. The incident was logged by security. The fix belonged to logistics. The value went straight to the P&L. If the data had stayed locked inside a security-only system, none of that would have happened.

One incident, five departments

Todd’s most direct example of this came from something as ordinary as a theft report. As he put it:

“Theft. Well, was it theft of somebody’s lunch out of the break room? Or was it theft of 50 catalytic converters that was going to impact production?”

Both are technically “theft.” Only one of them needs to reach production planning, risk management, and possibly law enforcement within the hour. Without a system built to capture that level of detail, and route it to the right people, a CSO is stuck choosing between generic categories that tell nobody anything or a flood of noise that buries the incidents that matter.

Scale that same idea across a corporate security operation and the list of stakeholders touching a single incident report gets long fast:

• HR: when an incident involves an employee investigation or workplace violence concern
• Legal: when there’s liability exposure or a compliance obligation
• IT: when access credentials need to be revoked or an insider threat is suspected
• Risk and insurance: when a claim needs to be filed or a pattern needs to be flagged before it becomes a bigger loss
• Executive leadership: when the incident touches business continuity or brand risk

Todd made the same point about relationships, not just data: “Key internal partnerships with HR, legal, compliance department, the IT department… that’s a pretty critical partnership for this corporate security team.” He also described a former CFO who once asked him, half seriously, whether the company even needed a formal crisis management team anymore, because incidents at his facility so rarely escalated into one. That’s what happens when the right information reaches the right department before a small problem becomes a big one.

The industry agrees this is no longer optional

SIA’s 2026 Security Megatrends report names this shift outright as Megatrend 3, “Security Solutions Lose Their Boundaries,” describing an industry-wide move from siloed physical security systems toward platforms that connect security data with IT, facilities, and operational systems.

Tara Dunning, vice president of converging technology at Wesco, frames it this way in the report: “Our industry’s boundaries are rapidly vanishing. Convergence across all technology stacks allows us to provide unified insights and control across the business ecosystem, which leads to safer, more efficient, more sustainable and more resilient enterprises.”

Read Fortino’s quote, Dunning’s quote, and Todd’s truck turnaround story together, and a pattern emerges. Buyers are no longer asking whether a security platform can log an incident. They’re asking whether it can get that incident to the people across the enterprise who need to act on it, in a format they can actually use.

What this means for how you evaluate incident reporting

If you’re a CSO or security director sitting through your next platform evaluation, a few questions from Todd’s own experience are worth asking directly:

• Can incident categories be customized enough to separate a break room theft from a production-impacting theft, or will everything get lumped into one generic bucket?
• If your service provider changes, does your incident history and reporting configuration go with them, or does it walk out the door?
• Can HR, Legal, IT, and Risk get the specific piece of an incident they need without wading through a full security report that wasn’t built for them?
• Does your platform support the kind of real-time dashboard access that lets your team spot a pattern, the way Todd’s team spotted a logistics problem hiding inside a security log?

Hear the full conversation

Todd’s webinar with Jeff DiDomenico covers a lot more ground than we can fit into one post, including how he built direct ownership of his incident data during a service provider re-bid, how he turned a company with no security culture into one where officers were treated as trusted teammates, and how he thinks CSOs should be evaluating AI-driven technology without getting swept up in the hype.

Watch the full on-demand webinar, “From Badge to Boardroom,” to hear Todd’s complete story in his own words. [Watch the On-Demand Webinar]