Despite the long-standing recognition of drones' security potential, technological and regulatory challenges have prevented many from truly exploring adoption. However, companies like Titan Protection are seeing these possibilities realized thanks to developments like the granting of nationwide Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) waivers that allow Titan's certified operators to deploy Autonomous Response and Patrol (ARP) drones for a variety of security tasks. Founded by Ryan Smith, the company has been a premier provider of video monitoring and security guard services for nearly 15 years, defining a visionary approach and outlook to how and where drones can create unmatched value as part of larger security frameworks.
At NestGest 2025, Smith described how this framework has been realized thanks to that waiver as well as changes with the technology. He talked thought the aspects of Titan's “blended” approach to security that involves human security personnel, drones, and, where applicable, autonomous systems. He mentioned that this reduced security incidents by 30-40% and helped clients realize a 60% cost savings compared to traditional security guards.
We wanted to learn more about what it has meant for Smith to utilize this security framework in a way that makes bottom-line sense for his clients. We talked with him about his background in the security industry, what it means to quantify success with the technology, the different ways he’s looking to approach creating value for his clients, and much more.
Jeremiah Karpowicz: Take us back to the creation of Titan Protection and Consulting in 2008. When and how did you recognize the need for this type of security service? And how were you thinking about drones in those early days of the technology?
Ryan Smith: I started as a security officer when I was eighteen but I’ve always had an interest in and connection with aviation. I went into the police academy early, but I started flying single engine airplanes when I was fourteen and my grandfather worked at the FAA.
My time as a police officer revealed a clear need for more comprehensive physical security solutions. In 2008, I founded the company to address this, partly because I realized the market was dominated by basic integration and guard services that were lacking. The integrators would tell you that you needed a camera, and the guard companies would say you needed a low-trained, low-paid guard. So that got me thinking about what it would mean to blend these things together to have a technology that went beyond cameras as well as a highly trained, high-quality person available for response. How do we blend those things together for the best recipe?
Drones were part of that consideration from the very beginning because I knew they’d be able to facilitate that combination like few other pieces of technology.
What can you tell us about how you thought about that combination in those early days versus now?
When I was a security officer, the video analytics we had at the time were not mature and it was a challenge to put together camera info that could be coming in from multiple places or sources. That got me thinking about what it could mean to have a camera tell us when there's activity so we could then send the person there, as opposed to having a person randomly stop by. I knew we could get there eventually with drones, but the ecosystem has evolved in a big way that’s allowed us to put these pieces together.
It's not about technology for technology’s sake though, as an important part of the equation starts with a security diagnosis. There’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, which is something to consider on every side of the equation. Do we need an officer with a gun or unarmed officers? Do we need cameras? It's a deliberate process that truly explores what we’re hoping to accomplish. It’s really about asking questions and learning about the pain points and what the right pieces of the puzzle are regardless of the technology because no two customers are going to have the same needs or threat picture.
Which is connected to how you’re thinking about drones as a tool versus technology for technology’s sake. But specifically, how you can use them has changed, hasn’t it?
I've been flying drones since those early days of the company, but truthfully, there was no meaningful way to use them at that time. Because of FAA regulation, we needed to stay within visual line of sight and because of the technology limitations, we needed to manually swap batters. Both of those things crushed the value proposition.
That regulatory piece has been my biggest battle over the years, because the waiver process is just too cumbersome. You could do a site-by-site waiver process, but it wasn't scalable. Plus, the manual battery swaps just meant we couldn’t make those operations cost-effective.
That gets at something I wanted to drill into with you, which relates to the value of the sorts of security services that you provide, which are always hard to quantify. What does it mean to properly calculate the ROI of these sorts of security services?
Our customer benchmarks the ROI against the cost of an on-site officer. That means that traditionally, if the technology solution isn't considerably less than what it would cost to have a physical guard presence there, they’d sticking with the traditional solution.
Some of that has changed with our nationwide BVLOS waiver though. We're the first security company to get to do that, and it’s allowed us to scale. We're quickly getting to the point where the price point is compelling against the on-site officer, which to our customers, is everything.
But the value isn’t just about what it means to compare what you can offer versus the approach to security that a company has always taken, is it? How are you able to outline the value of solutions and services that you can offer not just in terms of established security costs, but when compared with a theft or damage that never occurred?
Yes, and it’s important to break that all the way down.
To give you an example, we had a concrete company that called us after they had copper ripped out of their machines, with the replacement costs being around $30-40k. Those costs are obviously significant, but the real pain was on account of their plant being shut down for two weeks, and because of that, they lost millions. They called us to make sure that kind of shutdown didn't happen again.
Say security services cost you $100,000 a year. That’s a tangible number you can see in your expense line, but a security incident can cost you several million dollars. And to your point, if that established cost is $100K but you’re nonetheless vulnerable to those sorts of incidents, what’s at stake when you aren’t exploring the security options that are newly available? And for anyone without that baseline to compare security costs to, what is the cost of doing nothing?
In a security setting, that’s a very telling question to answer, because the losses are very visible and tallied up. If we do our job and we deter something from happening, nobody ever sees that piece. Ultimately, the wins we have are invisible.
It’s why we remind our clients and potential clients that our phone usually rings after something bad happened. We can get ahead of these things, but it requires a commitment to solutions that might have a significant cost, but they’re nothing when compared to the expenses related to a serious security incident. That’s also one of the reasons that consistent customers of ours can sometimes end up literally asking us, “do we still need to do all of this?” They’ll have gone months or even years without an incident. We have to break it to them that their lack of incident means what we’re doing is working. That’s exactly what we want.
That concept of your wins being invisible is incredibly powerful. So how do you approach conversations when someone is only focused on what they can see? Or what it means to quantify the absence of incidents?
You can get into benchmarks around costs, but it comes down to answering questions about what level of security is needed, regardless of what incidents have or haven’t happened. What level of security does someone need? The answer to that question is all that really matters, and it has nothing to do with specifics related to what someone is currently doing, or what has or hasn’t happened.
For example, think about the security needs of a trucking company that stores semi-truck trailers with valuable cargo. You can put a security officer on-site there overnight and that may cost you something like $13k for an overnight shift every month. That person is walking around the property and will be able to respond when someone shows up. But that’s really expensive, and if they do a patrol once per hour, which is standard, what are they doing in between? They may be sitting in their car and not paying attention.
We can provide that same trucking company with vastly improved awareness and the ability to respond with our ARP drones. We have a remote video monitoring center where we monitor several thousands of cameras across the country. That allows us to provide an alert to a security guard no matter when it happens, as opposed to just when they might be on patrol.
That’s where you can outline the true costs and stakes associated with security incidents, and it’s also where ARP drones are creating real value. They’re able to cover the entire property to enable almost total awareness as opposed to much smaller pockets of time and area. We can have eyes on the entire property and we can do that for perhaps half the piece of that dedicated security guard.
Most of the time with a camera, you’re just finding out what they already know. You review the footage to see you’ve been broken into. The cameras on our drones are way beyond that, but in some cases they’re also even more powerful than a security guard, because they allow us to actively respond and alert the proper authorities. The technology is allowing us to do more with less, to the point that we can even enhance what security guards can do. The info they’re capturing can alert us to activity that we can interact with in real-time.
Are there any examples that you can give of how drones have been able to deter or respond to security threats in a major way?
This technology really shines in larger areas and being able to identify places where nobody is supposed to be like the trucking cargo facility I mentioned. Think of places that are closed overnight, like transportation lots. The mere presence of a person in that space will allow us to take action. Those types of environments, which can range from construction sites to car dealerships to anywhere where outdoor assets are stored, are where the technology really shines.
But the value can also be seen with multi-family apartments or shopping centers that can use the technology for preventative patrols and to get a bird's eye view of the property. It’s expensive to get camera coverage in all areas, so the drones are able to cover what would otherwise be blind spots.
I imagine that kind of blind spot coverage is something that comes up once your customers are up and running with the technology and more comfortable with it, but has that comfortability also opened up new or different ways that want to utilize it?
Yes, and I can give you some examples of that.
On a construction site, you might be using the drone system at night for security. Construction is a big vertical for us because a lot of companies have been using security officers to sit at those sites all night, but quickly see that our mobile units are much more effective and cost less than the security officer. But then during the day, that same system can be utilized for inspection purposes.
We’re seeing synergy like that which allows for allows for dual-purpose use and shared budgeting. We’ve gotten lots of, “Can we use this to inspect the roof?” and “Can we make a 3d model of the property?” questions, so there's all sorts of different uses that are emerging once someone has a true sense of what the technology can do. As the technology further proliferates, we’ll see more and more of that.
That further proliferation is connected to your NestGen 25 presentation, where you mentioned you see immense potential for this innovation in scaling operations like remote patrols, asset monitoring, and rapid response. When and how do you see this potential being realized? What are the largest hurdles for wider spread adoption of drone security systems?
I think one of the things that FlytBase has done well connects back to what we were talking about at the very beginning of the conversation, which is that question of how do you blend these different solutions and technology into a one. How do we pull that all together so operators aren't bouncing around from software platform to software platform? FlytBase has answered that question.
Most of the mission planning software that has come out over the past few years have done a good job with flying their drone, but they needed to be integrated with something else to really be useful. We needed a better way to layer these pieces together to make them useful and actionable. That’s why what they’ve done represents an important industry milestone because it’s going to mean that it’s not just the early adopters using these solutions.
That’s a change we’re seeing on the security front as a whole, because we’re seeing these sorts of connections with cyber and physical security as well. Traditionally, you might have one person or department dealing with cameras, another with gates, another with guards and another for cyber. They overlap so much, so getting them all together changes the paradigm. For most pieces of technology, someone might be using 20% of what it’s capable of doing just because the scope of putting it all together is so daunting. But the pieces have come together, and they’re doing so in a way that makes sense for the bottom line, which is the real difference.
Which represents a big change on the technology side, and coupled with what’s changed with regulation, we’re at a new place. But how do you see that further changing once we get Part 108?
It’s exciting because we’ve gotten to the point where we can actually scale, which is a giant leap forward. In fact, we’ve seen more progress in the last six months than we saw in the previous five years. It's not hypothetical anymore. It’s here today and the pathways are becoming clear to move forward.
That’s partly why I’m not too caught up in what happens with Part 108, because it’s not going to become a reality until it goes through the NPRM process, and we don’t even have a timetable on that. We're in the waiver process for the next 18 to 24 months at a minimum, which is why I’m not focused on those eventual changes. How do we continue to work through the framework that's available today and keep the ball moving today? We can use the technology right now, and it’s working.
What advice would you have for someone who believes drones could positively impact their security operations but isn't sure where to begin?
Ask yourself or your team, “What are we trying to accomplish?” Start with the mission in mind and then work backward. You need to get those specifics because different threats will require different approaches.
Do you have equipment held on your lot? Or are you worried about employees’ cars in the parking lot? An office building is going to have different needs and different threats than a construction site, so step back and fully revisit the diagnosis from every angle before getting specific with any solution.
When you do get to that solution stage, the FAA’s “crawl, walk, run” approach,” can be really instructive. If you try things out in a small way, you can figure out what works, and then that’s your baseline for something bigger. You don’t need to eat the elephant. Taking more of a slow, deliberate approach can keep you from feeling overwhelmed.
But there’s also no reason to wait. Remote guarding has been going strong for 10 years, but there’s never been a better time to truly explore your options. There’s no reason to wait now that we can use this technology to create the value but also prove it out on the bottom line.
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