At its 56th Annual General Meeting in Berlin, the German Federal Association of the Security Industry (BDSW) dealt intensively with the protection of critical infrastructures (KRITIS) and the security industry’s contribution to this protection.
In front of more than 200 participants, BDSW President Gregor Lehnert called on the German government to take the security industry into account in the future CRITIS umbrella law in the presence of Johann Saathoff, Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Home Affairs, and representatives of the governing coalition.

The BDSW welcomed the fact that, with a KRITIS umbrella law, the legislator will no longer focus solely on IT security but on the physical protection of KRITIS in a holistic approach to protecting KRITIS. However, he cautioned that not including the security industry in the federal government’s overall regulatory approach to protecting KRITIS would leave security gaps.

“The security industry, with its more than 270,000 employees, is providing more and more activities that serve to secure or maintain all critical infrastructures in Germany,” Lehnert said. These include, in particular, property protection tasks, protecting supply chains, ensuring cash supplies, guaranteeing security and order in passenger traffic and carrying out aviation security checks. The BDSW president continued: “Surprisingly, however, our industry has not even been mentioned in the key points of the KRITIS umbrella law already published by the German government.

The security industry is system-relevant for the protection of KRITIS, Lehnert further explained. The KRITIS umbrella law must therefore stipulate the systemic relevance of the security industry for the protection of KRITIS. “In the scope of a KRITIS umbrella law, both the operators themselves and the critical services must be included and defined. The uniform implementation of future regulations for the physical protection of KRITIS at federal, state and district level must be ensured. This is the only way to avoid interpretation and implementation chaos by the authorities – as during the Corona pandemic – to the detriment of the security of CRITIS,” Lehnert concluded.