2020 is the year Magenta Security celebrates our quarter-century of business. From our modest beginnings in a cramped office managing a handful of guards, we are now proud to be a nationwide security company pushing industry standards forward on multiple fronts.
While we wish 2020 provided more reasons to celebrate, we still want to take this opportunity to look back on the past 25 years with a series of articles dedicated to this milestone.
Today, we are sharing the ways that our company and our industry has and has not changed since 1995.
Speculative science fiction of the past imagined flying cars and megacities, but the true revolution to how we live and work was brought about by invisible code sent between devices that get smaller every year.
While the core principles of feet-on-the-ground security have hardly been changed by the digital revolution, our additional security services and the way they are all linked together would be unrecognisable to the industry of 25 years ago.
Here are three ways that the nature of security has been transformed by technology in the past quarter-century:
As more and more business moved online, warehouses grew in size and complexity until distribution centres the size of towns began to fill the outskirts of cities and ports.
This fundamental shift in the modern economy and the logistics that fuel it has also presented an entirely new clientele, along with vast new sites and new challenges in securing them from internal and external threats.
In recent years, we have assessed sites with perimeters that stretch for miles, with constant traffic of valuables and multiple tiers of access control required within. It is a scale of complexity that, in a few short years, went from unprecedented to a new norm in security contracts for a nationwide security company.
While the technology mentioned above has helped us to adapt, we cannot rest easy. A new record-breaking distribution centre seems to be built every year and – with more people working from home than ever – the demand for online shopping is only going up, along with the infrastructure required to move goods from A to B.
In 2020, there has been increased discussion and action about how the security industry can confront racism. At Magenta Security, tackling racism is much more than a bullet point in our company mission statement. In fact, it can be traced back to our very founding.
Writing in “Why I Quit My Job and Founded Magenta”, Managing Director Abbey Petkar shared how the racism he encountered motivated him to start his own company:
“Racism closed many doors, especially in an industry that – at the time – wasn’t known for its professionalism or ethical standards … Setting up my own company was the only choice. Not only did I want to escape discrimination, I also knew I could do better than the narrow minded people who had been holding me back.”
While the situation has thankfully improved for ethnic minorities working in the security industry, wage discrepancies, underrepresentation in management and reports of abuse highlight that uprooting racism is an ongoing process and one that must be actively maintained to prevent us from sliding backwards.
No one could have predicted how challenging our 25th year of business would prove to be. But, thanks to the bravery and skill of staff at every level of Magenta Security, we have been able to adapt to and overcome the difficulties of doing business during a pandemic.
Security guards are frontline workers, keeping others on the frontline safe with the support of everyone else in the company – from the control rooms to customer services – who has proved their exceptional dedication this year.
We believe this commitment that our staff show to Magenta Security would not be possible without the commitment we show to them. The security industry is not perceived to be one where career progression is widely available, yet our retention rate proves that with fair wages, compassionate management and opportunities for advancement, security can be a lifelong profession.
That has been true for the past 25 years and will continue to be for the next.
Magenta Security is a nationwide security company and well equipped to provide security staff, technology and consultancy to any business operating in the UK. To get in touch, please call us on 0800 772 3786.
Magenta Security provide award winning security services throughout the UK. We are in the top 5% of ACS approved contractors and were the first security company in Europe to be awarded ISO 14001 for our environmental management systems.
