What a physical security assessment covers at San Diego biotech and life science facilities, and where lab buildings usually fail first.
San Diego's life science corridor runs on lab space, and lab space fails its security review in ways a normal office never would.
Here is what we look at when we assess a biotech or life science facility, and where these buildings usually break first.
In a typical office, the crown jewels are people and data. In a lab building, add specialized equipment that cannot be replaced on any sane timeline, irreplaceable samples and research materials, and intellectual property that walks around in notebooks and freezers. An assessment that treats your facility like a generic office will spend its time on the wrong floor. We start by mapping what actually cannot be lost, then trace every path a person could take to reach it.
Lab sites run on vendors: instrument techs, facilities crews, cleaning staff, delivery drivers, construction. Over time, access lists drift. The contractor who needed the vivarium corridor for a two-week project still has it eighteen months later. In nearly every assessment we run, we find active credentials belonging to people nobody on site can name. Cleaning that up costs almost nothing and closes one of the widest gaps we see.
Much of San Diego's lab stock is multi-tenant: shared lobbies, shared freight elevators, shared loading docks, sometimes shared corridors. Nobody fully owns the perimeter, so everyone assumes someone else does. The assessment has to draw the line explicitly - what your landlord covers, what your neighbor's guards cover, and what is actually yours - because the gaps live exactly at those seams.
Life science work does not keep office hours. A researcher alone in the building at 10pm is a different risk picture than the same building at noon. We look at lighting and sightlines on the walk from bench to car, whether the after-hours entry procedure gets followed or worked around, and what happens if that lone employee needs help. In California, this is also an SB 553 question: your Workplace Violence Prevention Plan has to identify and correct hazards, and after-hours lone work in a lab building is a hazard you can document and fix.
If there is a pattern across every facility type we assess, it is this: the front door gets the budget and the back door gets the wedge. Loading docks and receiving areas are propped, tailgated, and camera-poor. We test them the way someone with bad intent would use them, not the way the floor plan says they work.
A written report with findings ranked by risk - fix this week, fix this quarter, plan and budget - with photos of the actual gaps and options at different price points. The goal is a list your facilities lead, your EHS team, and your CFO can all read and act on.
If your San Diego facility is due for a real look, book a call with Anna. We run security assessments across San Diego County and the rest of California. For a sense of how quickly a stranger can move through a building that feels secure, read Can Someone Just Walk Into Your Office?
