By Joshua Douglas, SVP of Product and Engineering, Xtract One Technologies
I’ve spent the better part of my career building technology that solves problems other people have learned to live with. The best problems to solve are the ones where the solution, once you experience it, feels obvious. Where the response is less “that’s interesting” and more “why has nobody done this before.”
Mean Time to Secure (MTTS) is one of those solutions.
The physical security industry has been evaluating entry programs on two numbers since long before AI-powered weapons detection entered the market. How fast people move through the primary screen and how often the system fires an alert. Walk through metal detectors also only tracked throughput and alert rate. Those numbers get reported to leadership, included in vendor comparisons, and used to justify procurement decisions. And for the most part, nobody has questioned whether they’re actually telling the full story.
They’re not.
Neither throughput nor alert rate tells you what happens after the alert fires. How long secondary screening takes. Whether the backup your staff is managing on a busy event night comes from your detection setting, your staffing model, your concept of operations, or the technology itself. The entry experience your visitors are actually having is determined as much by secondary screening as by the primary screen. That half of the equation has been invisible in every metric the industry has used to measure performance, and the gap between what the numbers show and what security directors actually experience has been growing ever since.
Building a product that closed that gap required us to ask a question the industry hasn’t been asking: what does it actually cost, in time, to move one individual from first contact with the security system to fully cleared and proceeding into the venue, school, workplace? Not just the primary screen. The whole thing.
The Equation
MTTS = MTTD + MTTR
Mean Time to Detect is the primary screening phase. It starts the moment an individual enters the gateway’s sensor range and ends the moment the system issues a scan result. It’s what throughput measures, in much broader terms based on maximum processing with no constraints. It isolates the technology’s speed and the hardware’s throughput rate. Most vendors lead with this number because it tends to look good.
Mean Time to Resolve is the secondary screening phase. It starts the moment the system alerts and ends the moment the divestor has cleared the individual to proceed into the facility. It’s the half nobody has been tracking. It’s also the half that most directly reflects how a security program actually performs in practice, because it captures everything that happens after the technology does its job: the human response, the process efficiency, the staffing model, the concept of operations.
Together they produce Mean Time to Secure, the complete security-side entry metric. The only number that tells you what your program is actually doing on both sides of the gate, and what the individuals moving through it are actually experiencing.
What It Tells You That Throughput Doesn’t
When MTTS is high, you can look at the components and identify the cause. High MTTD points to a technology or configuration issue. High MTTR points to a staffing, ConOps, or alert volume issue. The ratio between the two tells you whether your program is balanced or whether secondary screening is carrying a burden that the primary screen is creating.
An optimized program runs close to a 1:1 ratio between MTTD and MTTR for alerted individuals. For passes, MTTR registers as zero, which means overall MTTS will naturally run lower than MTTD alone when measured across all individuals. The ratio becomes most meaningful when looking specifically at alerted individuals, where it tells you whether secondary screening is resolving efficiently relative to the time the primary screen is taking.
That distinction matters enormously for how security programs get evaluated and improved. Right now, a security director whose entry program is backing up during peak windows has almost no visibility into where the problem actually lives. They know the line is long. They don’t know if the fix is a sensitivity adjustment, an additional divestor during the peak 30 minutes, a ConOps change that reduces secondary screening interactions, or something else entirely. MTTS gives them that answer for the first time.
What We Heard From Customers
The idea for MTTS didn’t come from a product roadmap exercise. It came from listening to customers describe problems they couldn’t solve because they didn’t have the right data.
Across customer conversations, security teams consistently described the same challenge. A manufacturer needed documented proof that individuals were clearing security within an acceptable window to satisfy both leadership and union representatives. A corporate security team could tell leadership how many individuals were directed to secondary screening but had no answer for how long they waited or what the outcome was. A venue security team had no data to counter the assumption that screening was causing entry delays — their only option was recording video footage of ticketing lines to demonstrate the bottleneck was elsewhere.
Every one of those conversations pointed to the same missing piece. Secondary screening time. The variable most directly connected to how a security program actually performs, and the one nobody had built a way to track.
Why Now
The technology to track MTTS has existed for some time. What took longer was building the data layer that connects primary screening performance, secondary screening classification, and operational reporting into a single continuous metric. The Divestor enhancements in this new release are the piece that makes it possible. When a divestor classifies an alert in the Console App, that action timestamps the end of the MTTR clock. The data flows directly into Xtract One View, where MTTD, MTTR, and MTTS are tracked continuously across every deployed system and available for executive reporting at any time.
Security directors now have one metric that holds security performance and entry experience accountable simultaneously. That changes how programs get evaluated, how staffing decisions get made, and how security investment gets justified to leadership in terms that actually mean something.
A single data point was never a measurement. Throughput numbers and alert rates have been telling a partial story for as long as this industry has existed. MTTS is the full equation.
To find out how MTTS applies to your specific environment and what it means for how your program gets measured going forward, download our one pager below.
DOWNLOAD: Measure What Matters, Introducing Mean Time to Secure