It's late November 2008 and antigovernment protestors have taken over Bangkok's airport. Thousands of travelers from around the world are literally stranded and fear a violent clash between pro- and antigovernment demonstrators.

Just after reports of the problems at the airport surface, Brian Tuskan, senior director of Microsoft Global Security, gets a message on his Windows Mobile phone alerting him that 30 employees who had travelled to Thailand for business are now stuck. It's his job to make sure that Microsoft workers remain safe.

"Our goal was to run incident management in case things went south," Tuskan said of the Bangkok situation.

It sounds far-fetched, like a scene from an action movie, but Microsoft ultimately hired a firm that specializes in whisking people out of such dangerous situations. They managed to fly the workers out of the country from a military airport in Bangkok, within four days. The commercial airport didn't end up opening for a week after the protestors closed it down, and even then it wasn't fully operational, requiring some visitors to stay put even longer.

The quick response from Microsoft was due in part to an integrated global security operations center that Tuskan helped build. Without that system in place, his team might not have realized that company employees were at risk.

The centralized, integrated system uses off-the-shelf technologies, many from Microsoft but some from third parties, and allows security workers to catch thieves, respond to threats of violence on campus, ensure workers are safe after a natural disaster, summon fire fighters or police, and even respond to overheating data centers.

The security system is coordinated out of operations centers located in Redmond, Washington; Reading, England; and Hyderabad, India.

In the center on Microsoft's campus in Redmond, four security workers each sit behind one of about a dozen computers. Each computer has three monitors displaying live video and spreadsheets. On the wall in front of the workers hang three flat screen TVs running the news.

If the workers see a major event happening anywhere in the world on the news, they can very quickly look to see whether Microsoft has any nearby offices or employees. When the recent earthquake hit central Italy, for example, these workers pulled up a map that is overlaid with information about offices and employees.

Locating and zooming in on the epicenter of the quake, they discovered two Microsoft offices near Rome about 50 miles from the earthquake. One office had over 250 people in it. Immediately, security personnel were on the phone accounting for workers, Tuskan said.