The company that once guarded the bat used by Hank Aaron when he broke Babe Ruth's home run record in 1974 and the diamond Richard Burton gave to Elizabeth Taylor has quietly entered the Internet security market.

Irving, Texas-based Brinks Inc. is best known for its armored cars and 142 years of experience guarding bank loot. Now, Brinks' home security subsidiary, Brinks Home Security Inc., has teamed with Hyperon Inc. to offer an intrusion detection and response service to companies that can't afford a full-time IT security staff.

Brinks Internet Security, as the alliance

between Brinks Home Security and Hyperon is called, marks the first time a traditional brick-and-mortar security firm like Brinks has entered the Internet security market, although Pinkerton has a network security consulting unit.

Hyperon is a consulting and outsourcing firm that specializes in intrusion detection and incident handling. It places an intrusion detection system on a customer's network that is monitored remotely through a central monitoring facility.

Fifteen Brinks agents have been deployed to the new Brinks Internet Security venture, which is co-located with Hyperon in Wilmington, Del. Some monitoring will also take place at Brinks' operations center in Irving, where 120 Brinks agents monitor the homes and businesses of 700,000 Brinks clients.

Business Enabler

Brinks' entry into the network security market makes it clear that "the assets that make up a company's value are changing," said Russ Gates, global managing director of technology risk consulting at Arthur Andersen LLP in Chicago. One of the challenges for Brinks will be looking at security as a strategic business enabler and not strictly as a protective barrier, he said.

"Brinks is not known as a high-tech company," said Bob Allen, chief operating officer at Brink's Home Security. "This is an expansion of the brand name and a logical extension that gets us into the high-tech market."

Brinks and Hyperon plan to issue a "Protected by Brinks" logo for use by e-commerce sites as a sign of assurance, said Allen.

The companies are just now entering into discussions with several financial services companies and plan to extend the service to the manufacturing industry, said Hyperon CEO Jim Molini.

Although physical and IT security will eventually merge, "now is not the time," said Steve Hunt, a security analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Giga Information Group Inc. "The market is too distracted and end users spread too thin to replace a system that already works well enough. Neither Brinks nor Hyperon will be able to reach the e-business purchasers or the CIOs in order to make a sale that bridges the two security worlds."

A network administrator at an Internet service provider in Virrginia said he liked the idea of combining physical with Internet security but added that the saturation of the market could make it tough for Brinks to win major customers.

Keith Morgan, a network security specialist at Nitro, W. Va.-based Terradon Communications Group LLC, a software developer for Fortune 500 firms, said it's the Hyperon-Brinks combination that could make a difference with users, not simply the Brinks name. "The skill set required for data security just doesn't compare at all with physical [security]," he said. However, "everyone loves a one-stop shop."

Computerworld

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