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The future of security is information

Ten years on at Camsecure and we see information gathering as the next evolution of the surveillance systems. Camsecure has always been a supporter of event driven system philosophy stating that the ideal system should show the operator where issues may be and then tell them what should be done. We have also noted a trend for health monitoring of security systems in order to pinpoint failures as well as bridge any potential skills gap that may exist in analysing these systems.

Access control, alarms and video are not necessarily effective working independently. There has always been a lot of hype about camera image quality, access controls identity management, alarm system detection capability and other security systems event handling ability. The key is that all these systems produce information, most of it not relevant. The trick is to make this information relevant with the end goal to ensure that proper reaction is implemented and that effective investigations can also take place.

The way to make information relevant is by integrating systems and comparing the information they produce, the most useful of these systems is to use video to verify an event. An operator can quickly verify the threat level through video and can quickly eliminate false alarms by referring to video. Most of the attention of the operator in a control room is focused on watching the video and certainly the most complex task is the distribution of video, it is for this reason that we have found the most effective integrations are usually within the video platform. There is an argument for integrating systems in a PSIM platform, but this also adds another software layer, complexity and financial cost to a systems, with the exception when VMS system are from different manufactures then the decision becomes to standardise or switch to PSIM. Our recommendation is keep it simple and ascertain what can be achieved with existing VMS.

We have noted in recent times the large investments in IP-based security systems, but also noted the lack of skills in the industry to implement and maintain these systems. We see big companies focusing on price opposed to skills and experience when selecting installers for large IP surveillance projects in particular, which normally has a negative outcome. Additionally, many companies try to reinvent the wheel when there are successful templates already established in the market. It is also proven that proprietary hardware and closed systems do not have the longevity of open platform systems. Common sense dictates it is better to leverage the innovation of the entire industry and not only the technology from one company.

At Camsecure, our focus and success has been based on the best-of-breed open platform surveillance systems. We specialise on large implementations with two of the biggest Milestone Surveillance sites in Africa. Additionally, we have been working on custom integrations of traditionally disparate third-party systems such as access control, alarms, fire, perimeter intruder detection and weighbridges, so that all this information can be viewed simultaneously in one interface. The benefits include reduced operator training, reduction in false alarms, better utilisation of existing resource as well as quicker response. Integrating systems does make sense.

The greatest benefit of gathering all these systems’ information in a central place is that Camsecure has the ability to produce custom reports on the health status of these systems to the end user. If one considers the large investments in technology that often does not function as intended, having a system status report is essential to reduce risk and ensure compliance. Our focus is to take the guessing work out of installing and maintaining large or complex network surveillance projects and we believe we have been successful in this aspect; our new focus is to make these systems more relevant and produce greater value to our end users.

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