Page 44 - Security Today, May 2018

Smart City
SIafer Cities
Sinaloa, Mexico sees connected cities as the proper alternative
By Margie Gurwin
n Sinaloa, Mexico, the state’s govern- ment views enhancing public safety and security as priority number one. Sinaloa’s climate and terrain are perfect
for supporting its booming agricultural and industrial economy, and this prosperity is dependent on effective law enforcement ef- forts that combat the influence of powerful drug cartels entrenched within the region.
Culiacan is Sinaloa’s capital and largest city; more than 850,000 people live with- in the city and surrounding municipality. It is from there that M.C. Jose de Jesus Galvez, the state’s Secretary of Innovation and close aide to the governor, is busy at work creat- ing the state’s first unified security solution that he hopes will become a model for all of Mexico.
All major cities in Sinaloa have been se- cured by citywide surveillance solutions for well over a decade. While these systems have been effective at the local level, the state rec- ognized the need for a more secure, respon- sive environment capable of providing a sin- gle-seat view of their entire security domain.
The new statewide initiative seeks to combine these disparate citywide systems within a single platform, allowing for greater coordination between all municipalities and their law enforcement agencies.
Leveraging a Thin Client
As with many city and state governments, Cu- liacan and Sinaloa lacked extensive financial resources to pay for their security upgrade; yet it was not an option to consider any solution that required compromises in performance or reliability. Sinaloa’s solution is built upon Vi- con’s new web-based VMS, Valerus.
“Making use of a thin client provides tremendous value,” said M.C. Galvez, one of the systems integrators involved in the proj- ect. “Using a traditional thick-client solu- tion, the cost and hassle of maintaining cur- rent software on all monitoring stations is prohibitively expensive.
“In the past, every time an upgrade was released, we spent a lot of time and money bringing all of the system’s PCs up to speed. With the Valerus thin client, all of that has been eliminated. The only hardware that re-
quires a software upgrade is the application server. The monitoring stations are always cur- rent and require no maintenance whatsoever.”
Galvez said that his security team “can ac- cess the platform from anywhere, from any computer. We’ve been able to use many of the computers we already had in place that were running Windows 7 or later, and we didn’t have to purchase any workstation/client li- censes. This saves us a lot of money that can be reinvested in expanding coverage zones.”
Managing System Health
Keeping all cameras up and running is a challenge for any city. This is particularly true in Culiacan, where criminals regularly try to disable or remove them.
“We actually had a situation where a cam- era was installed at a traffic intersection, and by the time we got back to the command cen- ter to connect it to the VMS, it was already gone.” Vicon’s technical team said.
The software’s built-in health dashboard makes it easy to keep track of the status of all cameras, even in an installation of this size. It also provides performance data for all NVRs, the application server and trans- mission network.
“The monitoring dashboard helps us to identify bottlenecks, communication issues between cameras and NVRs and, most im- portantly, how much bandwidth we are con- suming,” Galvez said.
It also supports the city in its frequent in- teractions with insurance companies.
“When a camera is taken out due to van- dalism, we can prove to the insurance carrier that it was fully functional just prior to the incident.” Galvez said. “This makes it possi- ble to get the camera replaced immediately.”
Added Value through Integrations
A statewide initiative required the ability to
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GOVERNMENT SECURITY MAY 2018