Page 9 - Campus Security & Life Safety, September 2017

lenging for university personnel to gain access to certain buildings and rooms.
“I realized immediately that to start fixing the problems, we needed a plan,” said Jeff Morgan, UCF’s director of security and emer- gency management. “I began with identifying as many gaps as possible, and then planned to hire dedicated staff to begin improvements.”
The current security team at UCF is small but making an immediate and positive impact. Jeff started by hiring an Assistant Director of Security to lead the team. From there, UCF has hired two additional profes- sionals from within their workforce who had experience in both security and information technology. The first addition to the team was Jacob Hughey, in July 2015, to manage secu- rity camera operations, maintenance and projects, and to help address the problem of having multiple recording servers in various locations across campus. UCF has shown their commitment to improving physical security by funding necessary infrastructure upgrades. Within just a few months, they purchased and installed a new 3.0 petabyte centralized server farm for the security cam- era footage and upgraded their video man- agement software with the latest version.
In April 2016, Steven Freund was hired to manage the university’s access control system, work on converting disparate systems to the campus standard system, and increase the number of access controlled doors. He per- formed the first software upgrade of the access control software, which was three years behind the latest version. Both Jacob and Steven have implemented formal training for end users, started coordinating all installations and main- tenance, and have formed strong partnerships with UCF’s IT Team, which they feel is a criti- cal step moving forward.
This team has also been involved with designing the physical security for all new construction projects including academic buildings, utility buildings, research facilities, parking garages, the marching band practice facility, athletics facilities and retail locations. The team is designing the security for a new Downtown Orlando campus with new aca- demic buildings, parking garages and a public safety space. The office’s staff attends all con- struction meetings from concept through completed construction and works closely with the architects, general contractors, elec- tricians, security integrator and other sub- contractors as necessary.
Some security professionals are fortunate to have the opportunity to be involved in helping build security into a newly construct- ed building once in their career. The UCF Security team has been involved in more than
10 new buildings and hundreds of minor projects, and UCF is continuing to grow at a rapid pace.
Looking to the future, Jeff recognizes the need to proactively monitor security at UCF. To accomplish this goal, he is designing and building a Global Security Operations Center (GSOC). Morgan stated, “UCF has a very state-of-the-art Emergency Operations Center, but during Hurricane Matthew in October 2016 and during many exercises, we realized that we needed a dedicated location to monitor and respond to security concerns as they occur and provide real-time situational awareness.”
UCF is undergoing the physical and tech-
nological design of their GSOC with two video walls, three state-of-the-art worksta- tions, and interoperability with the UCF Police Dispatch Center. The GSOC will have the ability to monitor security cameras, guard force operations, access control, and students and faculty who are traveling internationally.
“During many of the recent international incidents that have occurred, it was difficult to arrange timely communication with UCF students traveling abroad. UCF is increasing its travel abroad program from 300 students to 3,000 students in the upcoming year and looking at having future campuses overseas. We are creating this GSOC with that in mind,
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