Physical security is becoming a data operations problem

An average of 342 alarms per day.

That's the reality reported by organisations surveyed in HiveWatch's 2026 benchmark study into the state of physical security. For larger enterprises, the volume is even higher. Add a false alarm rate of 32.5% across all respondents (rising to 44% among organisations with more than 1,000 employees) and a stressful picture begins to emerge.

Physical security has entered the age of information overload.

For you, our audience of cybersecurity professionals, this will sound familiar. Security operations centres have spent years grappling with alert fatigue. SIEMs, EDR platforms, cloud monitoring tools and threat intelligence feeds generate a constant stream of events – most of which never become security incidents. The challenge has gradually moved from collecting data to interpreting it.

Now, the HiveWatch findings suggest physical security teams are arriving at the same destination.

More sensors, more systems, more noise

Modern physical security operations bear little resemblance to the guard-and-gatehouse model many people still associate with the industry.

Today's environments are built around:

• Connected cameras
• Access control platforms
• Environmental sensors
• Visitor management systems 
• Monitoring tools spread across multiple locations 

Every device generates information. Every platform produces alerts, and every alert requires a decision. As an organisation grows, the complexity of all this compounds. 

The study found that organisations with ten or more locations receive significantly higher alarm volumes than smaller operations. At the same time, larger organisations also reported some of the highest false-positive rates.

This creates an operational dilemma that cyber teams know well. Security needs visibility across increasingly complex environments – but every additional source of data adds another stream requiring analysis. More visibility brings more information, but it also brings more noise.

Cybersecurity teams learned this lesson years ago. Physical security teams are learning it now.

Confidence is high, but performance metrics suggest complexity 

The report notes that 93% of respondents said they were confident in their ability to detect and respond to a coordinated threat.

Only 19% said they consistently meet their own service-level agreements.

If you put that together, you see an industry confronting a growing gap between confidence and operational execution.

In cybersecurity, performance metrics often expose realities that instinct and experience miss. Response times, alert backlogs, staffing pressures and investigation quality become measurable. And once measurement enters the picture, assumptions have to be scrutinised. 

Physical security seems to be moving through a similar phase. As operations become increasingly digital, leaders gain more visibility into how their teams perform. Alarm response times can be tracked; escalation processes can be measured; analyst workloads can be quantified.

The result is a clearer understanding of operational effectiveness – and, in many cases, operational strain.

AI is arriving for the same reason it arrived in cyber

The study also highlights rapid interest in artificial intelligence – 58% of organisations already use AI within their physical security operations, while a further 39% are evaluating potential deployments.

That means 97% are either actively using AI or considering it.

This level of adoption comes down to a practical need. Physical security teams are searching for ways to reduce false positives and help operators focus on incidents that genuinely require human attention – objectives that mirror the reasons cybersecurity teams embraced automation and AI-assisted workflows.

In both disciplines, the underlying challenge is the same:

• Too much information
• Too few human analysts
• Increasing pressure to respond faster

The tech might be different, but the operational pressures are very similar. 

So the convergence conversation is evolving

Discussions about physical-cyber convergence have tended to focus on organisational structures: 

• Should teams merge? 
• Should the CSO report to the CISO? 
• Should operations centres sit under a single leadership function?

Those questions are still relevant. But this new data shows that beyond those questions, physical and cyber security increasingly operate within the same environment: one defined by continuous streams of data, and the need to identify meaningful threats within vast amounts of noise.

Instead of being a strategic objective, the convergence of cyber and physical security is becoming an operational necessity.