Page 25 - Campus Security & Life Safety, March/April 2021

"A unified system provides everything security staff need within a single UI to help them effectively and efficiently protect people and assets."
By Jason Friedberg
With a unified system, granting access through a door is a simple as looking at the video and then clicking one button to let someone in.
Reducing Physical and Data Noise
With so many sensors, devices and systems providing so much infor- mation, one of the big challenges facing security operators is noise. There are two types of noise: physical and data.
Physical noise comes from alarms that are produced by a physical security system. Traditionally, dispatchers or other security staff had to acknowledge these alarms, including fire and panic, by going over to a panel in the command center and hitting the alarm.
With an integrated system, alarms no longer require operators move to the alarm panel. However, depending on the setup, they might have to switch workstations or toggle from one system to another to acknowledge and deal with them.
Working with a unified solution means that security staff don’t have to leave their workstation station or the system they’re monitor- ing to acknowledge incoming alarms. In some systems, they can go straight into a mapping interface to acknowledge them. The unified system also allows operators to more efficiently verify whether or not they are dealing with a false alarm.
Data noise is also a problem. All the information coming into a workstation can be overwhelming for operators. When they have to acknowledge an ever-increasing number of unfiltered events, impor- tant information can get lost. For example, with all the video and access control data associated with daily access requests continually streaming into security workstations, it can be difficult for operators to see an alert for a forced door. When nothing is filtered, every piece of data appears equally urgent. With so much undifferentiated data coming in, how can security staff possibly do their jobs effectively?
Unification can solve this problem because, when all the data is coming into one location, the system can correlate and prioritize alarms. A unified system can control nuisance alarms and requests by allowing organizations to establish their own rules that enable the sys- tem to determine which events require operator attention and which do not. In the case of a forced door, for example, an organization can set a rule to bring up forced door alarms that occur only after hours.
This is not possible with an integrated approach because the sys- tems and their data remain separate. Taking a unified approach increases operator efficiency as they only respond to actual alarms.
Other Advantages of Unification
In addition to improving security, unified systems also offer advan- tages in many other areas, including after-event investigation, train- ing, and total cost of ownership (TCO).
When it comes to after-event investigations, an integrated system requires security staff to go back and forth between two or more separate systems to find the incident. Then, they have to align the data in the systems by correlating time stamps. If the systems are out of sync, the task becomes more difficult.
With a unified system, searching for an event or incident is done in one system. This greatly simplifies and speeds up the process because video, access control, communication and other sensor data can all be found in one place. All the data in the system is also bookmarked in time, which makes it easy for personnel to find and view the evidence
For example, when an organization integrates access control with video, the two systems come back to the command center but appear either on a split-screen or on two separate screens. While they might appear side-by-side, the two programs do not actually communicate with one another. This means that operators grant door access through the ACS, but, when they need to perform identity verification, they must move to the video management side to view the footage.
To move between systems, an operator must either use a toggle switch or actually get up and go to another workstation. In either scenario, the operator still has to maneuver between two different systems to perform what should be a single task like verifying identi- ties to grant access. One serious consequence of this setup is that operators can miss alarms or incidents in one system as they are com- pleting tasks in another.
Unification eliminates these problems. Workstations can be set up to allow operators either to monitor all systems at once or to focus on one system while still being able to move seamlessly into another.
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