CFATS Best Practices Meeting

The Security Industry Association (SIA) is hosting a town hall style on-line meeting looking at best practices for meeting CFATS performance requirements. The meeting will be held on January 27th at 2:00 pm EST. Registration is free for SIA members and costs $35.00 for non-members. Among the presenters at the meeting is Sue Armstrong, Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Infrastructure Protection, so one would expect to hear some updated information on the implementation of CFATS program.

It is not clear from the SIA web site, but since SIA represents “manufacturers, service providers and integrators of electronic physical security equipment”, I would suspect that the other presenters will concentrate more upon that type of equipment for this audience. Two of the four presenters are corporate security managers for chemical companies (BASF and Baker Hughes; well Baker Hughes does have chemical operations) so there is a good chance that they have direct experience with the SSP inspections through one or more of their facilities.

I have never observed an SIA presentation before, but the description of this as a ‘town-hall’ style meeting implies at least a limited question/answer session is involved. That is valuable in and of itself. Besides, I’ve never heard of a presentation where Ms. Armstrong was involved that did not provide valuable new information about the CFATS program.