The role of security in Thailand has traditionally been one of a "Guard". Its responsibility has targeted prevention of company loss, and thus has not truly played any significant role in company management. Not only has security played a small and unimportant role in company operations, but it also has often been implemented by departments that comprised few, if any, security professionals, e.g., HR and Facility Service Departments. As the result, security has frequently overlooked and haphazardly implemented, even though it is critical to ensure safe and responsible company operations.

After the 9/11 event in USA, and a number of significant security incidents happened worldwide, such as in London, Spain, Indonesia, India, it is clear that security threats have been become an international concern. They could happen anywhere and anytime. In today’s world security has become increasingly important to organizations or companies in running their businesses amid an environment of multiple threats, especially, terrorist activities, which exist everywhere. Companies must learn how to survive and live with them; otherwise, business can simply not proceed. Terrorism and other types of threats can not be eliminated or ignored, particularly in the high risk countries to which companies need to expand their business, i.e. countries in the Middle East.

1 Aligning security with the business, therefore, does not merely make companies safer-it is one of the most important sources of competitive advantage in the twenty-first century.

Charlie Edwards, Rachel Briggs "The business of Resilience, Corporate security for the 21st century" 2006

The modern security function must play an important part of company operations. Security strategic planning and management must be integrated into a company’s business plan in order to assist in achieving their goals and maintaining their competitive advantage. Included should be: clear and practicable policy, security risk assessment, mitigation measures, security awareness promotion, traveling guidelines, and information networking. Notably important as well is getting cooperation from everyone in the organization wide up/down and across, especially at senior management levels because it will then cascade down to line management, the skeleton of any organization

Keywords:
Upstream Oil & Gas, modern security function, mitigation measure, security function, information, security measure, charlie edwards, corporate governance, operation, data security
Subjects:
Security, Information Management and Systems, Data and communications security, Data security
Copyright 2007, Society of Petroleum Engineers
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