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Three considerations for off-site monitoring

Many reasons are given to promote off-site monitoring: safety of the guards, centralised response, easier management etc. But does moving the monitoring truly solve any problems or are we just centralising the headache? Security Warehouse offers three issues to consider when looking at a remote monitoring solution:

• Although it is definitely easier to monitor and manage the guards on duty, this is often mitigated by the fact that the same guard is suddenly expected to monitor multiple sites, instead of just the one he is assigned to. This can in turn be balanced by hiring better trained and more motivated guards, where quality can really trump quantity, but of course such quality will always come at a price.

• The second consideration should also be the link to the control room itself. In this case, a back-up link is always proposed, but two links running on the same technology always share the same weakness: cut one cable and the whole link still goes down. Mixing technologies should always be considered in this case.

• An added advantage is, of course, built-in intelligence, line crossing and zone control that never sleeps will definitely contribute to such systems’ effectiveness, allowing guards to focus on areas that are seeing unusual activity. Here the biggest consideration should be coverage areas and with the industry notoriously stingy, the client must be made aware that cutting the amount of cameras can drastically reduce the system’s effectiveness.

Although there are many more design problems that should be considered, these three should be on the top of the list for those proposing this solution.

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