SECURITY // Living a Secure Lifestyle, with UMBRA
In a world obsessed with bunkers, biometrics and worst-case AI scenarios, what does it actually mean to live a secure life? In this Essential Series conversation, Kate Bright, CEO and founder of Umbra International Group, reframes security not as guards, gates and gadgets, but as a human, holistic “secure lifestyle” built on Four Pillars: physical, digital, reputational and emotional health. From community WhatsApp groups and Google alerts to cognitive resilience and next-gen online safety, she explores how to move from reactive fear to proactive, everyday peace of mind, and why the real work of security now starts with a conversation, not a crisis.
Security, for most people, still looks like a stereotype: a man in black at the end of a driveway, CCTV cameras blinking red, a safe bolted into a wall. For Kate Bright, it looks more like a WhatsApp group, a health screening, a Google alert, and a really honest conversation about what’s keeping you awake at night.
Bright is the founder and CEO of Umbra International Group, a “security private office” born out of nearly three decades in the private client and single family office world. She started in close protection, boots on the ground, bodyguard training, the world everyone imagines when they hear the word “security.” But over time, working closely with global families, she realised something important: the real work of keeping people safe increasingly happens long before a crisis, and far beyond the traditional tools of gates, guards and gadgets.
“Everyone wants to feel safe,” she notes, “but the industry has historically been exclusive and inaccessible.” Umbra’s purpose, as she frames it, is to flip that script: to make a “secure lifestyle” something that feels human, holistic and proportionate to the way people actually live, not a specialist service reserved for the ultra-visible or ultra-wealthy.
That phrase, Secure Lifestyle, is more than marketing. Umbra has now trademarked it, and in many ways it captures a broader shift in how security is being defined. Over the last decade, our sense of risk has moved from the purely physical to a blend of physical, digital, reputational and emotional. We live in what Bright calls a VUCA environment: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity. Passwords, deepfakes, sextortion scams, quantum computing, hyper-connected children, always-on news cycles, and the quiet, grinding impact of stress and burnout. The old model of “call security when something goes wrong” simply isn’t enough.
“If we’re honest,” she says, “most of us know we should be doing things like setting up a password manager or checking our privacy settings, but there’s a paralysis of overwhelm. Security becomes a ‘tomorrow problem’ in the same way that finances often do.” The result is familiar: tomorrow doesn’t come, risks accumulate, and when something finally breaks, an account hacked, a watch stolen, a child compromised online, the response is expensive, reactive and traumatic.
Umbra’s answer is deceptively simple: organise the conversation. The firm’s framework is built around Four Pillars of a Secure Lifestyle, physical, digital, reputational and emotional/health. Instead of dropping a 60-page risk assessment on a client’s desk, they use these pillars to triage: What’s happening in your physical world? How exposed are you digitally? Who holds power over your reputation? And how resilient are you, in terms of mental, physical and cognitive health?
All four matter equally. If a new client hasn’t had a health screening in the last year, Bright considers that a security flag. “We want to work with risk-resilient clients, physically, mentally, cognitively. How you perceive risk is directly linked to how you’re feeling on any given day.” In other words, it’s hard to make good security decisions if you’re exhausted, burnt out, or struggling silently.
This is where Umbra’s approach diverges from the industry’s old image. The work might still include physical measures, route planning, residential security, travel risk, but it might just as easily start with helping someone build a community WhatsApp group, set up Google keyword alerts for their name and business, or establish small daily “resilience snacks” such as movement, sleep rituals and nervous system regulation. Security is not a siloed specialist project; it’s threaded through how you live, who you trust, and how your body and brain are coping.
Clients, she says, are changing too. Five years ago, many came to her with a version of the same brief: make this go away. Fix the burglary, the stalker, the breach, and then disappear. Now, more arrive saying: I have an idea of what feeling safe looks like. These are the things I’d like to focus on. They want to be part of the process, not simply protected from afar. They’re willing to talk about their own appetite for risk, to sit in the discomfort of big decisions, and to see security less as an insurance policy and more as an ongoing partnership.
That shift is happening against a backdrop of accelerating technology and an increasingly anxious narrative about AI. Bright is frank about the fears she hears: clients asking whether they need bunkers in New Zealand, or preparing for “Q-Day,” the hypothetical moment when quantum computing destroys contemporary encryption and our digital lives are laid bare. The apocalyptic tone, she suggests, can easily become its own kind of paralysis.
“Security should not give you more stress than it removes,” she says. “I actually like planning for worst-case scenarios because it lets you live a better today. If you’ve thought about who you’d call, and in what order, you don’t have to live in a bunker, literal or psychological.” The goal is not to deny that certain futures are possible, but to reframe planning as a way of reclaiming agency rather than succumbing to dread.
Health, in this reframe, is the great leveller. “Health makes equal any amount of wealth,” Bright observes. She has seen, over decades, that serious health crises collapse hierarchies of status and success far more brutally than most people admit. It is one reason Umbra is leaning so heavily into what she calls “health-related security resilience”: helping clients invest in their own cognitive, physical and emotional capacity so they are better able to navigate everything else: business, family, money, risk.
The emphasis on people extends beyond the private client. One of the most quietly radical parts of Umbra’s model is how it insists on working with other advisers rather than around them. Bright lights up when she describes sitting with a client’s wealth manager, tax lawyer and trustee, asking what she calls “confident questions”: Where will this family actually feel safe jurisdictionally? How do the structures being proposed protect, or expose, them in real life? How could small changes make a huge difference if something goes wrong?
It is, in her view, the advisory ecosystem that needs to adapt as much as any individual. Security can no longer be sold as a bolt-on. It belongs in the same room as wealth planning, estate structuring and tax advice, because the risks themselves are intertwined: fraud, litigation, kidnapping, reputational damage, cybercrime, online harassment, disinformation. The more globally mobile a family is, the more those strands knot together.
If the macro picture is volatility, the micro picture is often London. The British capital, like many global cities, has been cast recently in a harsh light: videos of watch snatches in Mayfair, phone thefts in the West End, social media reels of brazen street crime. Bright is careful not to minimise the pain of victims, she has had her own phone stolen in the past, but she is equally wary of letting narrative outrun nuance. Crime trends are complex, she notes, and statistics are easily distorted by changes in reporting and mapping.
Her answer, again, is community. In her corner of southwest London, she sits on a local policing panel and belongs to a network of interconnected street WhatsApp groups that function like a modern, digital Neighbourhood Watch. When crime is logged, resources can be allocated. When information is shared, people adjust their behaviour. For many of her clients, one of Umbra’s non-negotiables is plugging into these neighbourhood networks, alongside local policing, rather than treating security as something that can be outsourced entirely to professionals.
That same logic extends to travel. Bright is seeing more demand for discreet, security-informed planning for “holidays of a lifetime,” particularly multi-generational trips after liquidity events. Here, too, the health pillar looms large: the goal is not just to avoid theft or disruption, but to prevent the trip itself becoming a health crisis because nobody considered capacity, medical support or recovery time. The glamorous moments sit on top of a risk framework that, if done well, is almost invisible.
Perhaps the most urgent arena, though, is the next generation. Bright speaks with a mix of concern and optimism about children and teenagers raised in a digital ecosystem their parents barely understand. Stranger danger used to be about dark alleys and unmarked vans; now it is just as likely to manifest as an AI-generated “friend” on Snapchat, a sextortion gang operating from another continent, or the slow erosion of a young person’s sense of what a normal interaction feels like.
The answer, she argues, cannot be more shame, secrecy or cotton wool. “It’s not a case of if, but when, young people are exposed to something unacceptable,” she says. The real question is whether they know who to tell, and whether that disclosure will be met with panic and punishment or calm, structured help. She advocates for a “psych-first, tech-enabled” approach: conversations at home, in schools and with advisers that normalise mistakes, distinguish between controlled missteps and genuine danger, and teach young people how to read their own discomfort as a signal, not a weakness.
Against this backdrop, her optimism might sound surprising. But it is genuine. There is, she suggests, enormous opportunity in this moment to build better relationships, between adults and children, between neighbours, between advisers, between disciplines that previously operated in silos. Defence technology is increasingly dual-use, helping to protect civilians as well as nations. Communities have more tools than ever to coordinate and communicate. And individuals have unprecedented access to information about their own health and cognition, even if that occasionally expresses itself in a slightly obsessive fascination with devices like hyperbaric oxygen chambers or sleep-regulating wearables.
The task is to harness that energy without letting it tip into obsession or fear. “Security, at its root, means freedom from fear,” Bright reminds us. It is not about building bunkers and withdrawing from the world. It is about designing a life in which you can breathe out, knowing you have thought about the risks that matter, in a way that aligns with how you actually live.
In that sense, the secure lifestyle is less a product and more a practice: a series of conversations, check-ins, small adjustments and shared responsibilities that compound over time. Join the neighbourhood WhatsApp group. Set the Google alerts. Have the health screening. Talk to your children. Ask your wealth adviser and your security adviser to sit at the same table. Decide what “feeling safe” looks like for you, not for your neighbour or your newsfeed.
In a volatile world, we may not be able to control everything. But, as Bright insists, there are “so many things we can do to control the controllables.” The work is to start.
Secure Lifestyle: A Practical Checklist
Begin with one honest conversation
Note what’s been worrying you lately—online, physical, reputational, or emotional—and say it out loud to someone who can help.
Check your four pillars
Physical: daily routes, home entry points, travel plans
Digital: passwords, 2FA, device updates, social privacy
Reputational: Google alerts on your name, business and family
Emotional/Health: annual health screening, sleep, stress, cognition
Set up Google Alerts
Your name, your company, your family name—an early-warning system for reputation and identity.
Join or create a neighbourhood WhatsApp group
Local visibility and shared awareness are the fastest route to real-world protection.
Review travel plans through a safety lens
Medical capacity, connectivity, emergency contacts, and trusted people in-destination.
Introduce digital rules for the family
No shame, open conversations, and clear escalation points for children and teens.
Create a “first call” list
If something happens, who do you ring first? (Personal, professional, digital, legal.)
Schedule small resilience habits
A tiny daily practice for physical, mental or cognitive wellbeing—your state of mind drives your risk decisions.
Revisit once a year
Treat your secure lifestyle like your financial planning: slow, steady, compound safety.