DENVER, CO Thornton Tomasetti, the international engineering firm, has established an Operational/Technical Security Services (OTSS) sector to complement its Weidlinger Protective Design practice. The newly formed group provides a wide range of cutting-edge security solutions to architects, business owners, developers and public agencies to combat a variety of natural and human-caused hazards. Recently retired US Army Colonel Bill Edwards has joined the firm as a Vice President in the Denver, Colorado, office to lead the team and grow the OTSS service offerings across the firm.

During his 27-year military career, Colonel Edwards has held numerous leadership positions, including commanding a battalion in Iraq for 14 months. Colonel Edwards has extensive experience in such areas as strategic planning, intelligence gathering and analytics, inter-agency communications, policy development, technical transformation, contract negotiations, budgetary oversight, team leadership, staff training and decision support. He has managed complex, multi-million-dollar projects in the United States and internationally, designed security solutions and upgrades to new and existing infrastructure, provided structural hardening, ingress and egress routes, defensive positions, surveillance and counter-surveillance systems as well as established guard mount procedures and patrolling operations. 

Thornton Tomasetti has an extensive portfolio of high-profile protective design and physical security projects around the world spanning decades. The new OTSS team is composed of proven leaders in counter-terrorism, counter-theft, cybersecurity, and electronic and physical security with more than 80 years of collective experience providing security services. Utilizing leading-edge technology, OTSS takes a holistic approach to security services, ensuring clients that their critical assets and investments are protected. OTSS provides threat and vulnerability risks assessments (TVRAs) backed by analytics, structural blast analysis and 3D building information modeling (BIM). Determining the best technological security solutions for projects in any environment, the team gives clients a detailed understanding of their security posture and, most importantly, ways to mitigate identified risks and vulnerabilities.

Among the services OTSS provides are:  

"¢ Analytics-based security cameras
"¢ Advanced facial and iris technology
"¢ Aggression and gunshot analytics
"¢ Machine learning analytics to detect potential threats
"¢ Electromagnetic pulse and anti-eavesdropping capability
"¢ Drone Detection Technology
"¢ Publicly available information and sentiment analysis
"¢ Advanced multi-factor authentication access control 
"¢ Advanced long-range perimeter security and detection

"Thornton Tomasetti's Operational/Technical Security Services provides the next level of professional security solutions," Colonel Edwards said. "The team's strength is demonstrated by our agility, expertise and ability to begin work immediately on any project, anywhere, that requires an integrated approach. We aim to provide a holistic security services offering that is unmatched in the current commercial space."