Find news and information for the executive corporate security director, CSO, facility manager and assets protection manager on issues of policy, products, incidents, risk management, threat assessments and preparedness.
Issue link: http://sdi.epubxp.com/i/941796
Services February 2018 www.SecurityInfoWatch.com / Security Dealer & Integrator 37 providing managed services, espe- cially by automating and improving service capabilities. What steps come next will vary depending on factors relating to the integrator, the markets served and the technology infrastructures of the customers. Integrators need to refocus from a project and hardware/ software-based strategy to a well-defined services-based strategy that focuses on the business outcome of their customers. This will require some changes to their organizations." — Eddie Meltzer, Security Cloud & Mobile Partners Surveillance Systems: The Weak Link? IT-style automated updating and documentation can protect integrators, their clients and the technology Video surveillance systems typically have multiple shortcomings – customers with high-camera-count video deployments find it nearly impossible to keep camera firmware current, and most cameras never have been updated since installation. Although cameras are computers that have embedded web servers and run video analytics software, they were not designed to be managed the way that IT departments manage servers, printers and other networked computing devices. Full-feature cameras have settings that cannot be set in the VMS software – they must be configured via camera web pages; thus, with settings variations residing across hundreds to thousands of cameras, most camera systems are not fully documented or backed up. One result of video surveillance system shortcomings is that secu- rity video systems have become the highly publicized target of choice for large-scale malware attacks. Another result is that when corporate security investigators look for the video record of an incident that should be there, 10-20 percent of the time the video is missing. Just two years ago, the city manager of Dallas told reporters, explaining why a police officer shooting was not captured by the new camera system, that based on the state of technology and cost factors, it was reasonable to expect that 80 percent of the cameras would be recording at any one time. That meant out of the city's 400 new cameras, 80 of them would not be doing their job on any given day. That caused quite an uproar. "Using Viakoo automation we have been able to end the missing video problem," says Brad McMullen, Stanley Security's VP of Marketing and Product Solutions. "Managed Services are about leveraging specialized automation services on a continuous basis to have infrastructure performing at (better than) 99-percent uptime for all devices and systems. With that in place, we can build the true managed services – such as solutions for service assurance of video and access control systems, virtualized preventative maintenance, systems verification and compliance, and camera password checking and firmware updating, among others."