Page 76 - Security Today, April 2021

Unlocking Business Intelligence
Unification helps protect campuses
Unified Solutions
Advances in IP technology have greatly improved physical security solutions and have allowed the industry to move toward getting systems to work together. This has been especially important for large corporate, health and educational campuses.
To improve security and operational efficiency, the main focus has been on systems integration. This process involves bringing different components together, including video management, access control, automatic license plate recognition, communications and intrusion detection. Unfortunately, integrating multiple systems does not nec- essarily mean they will be able to operate together as a unified system.
Unification is a more effective strategy. In a unified system, all the components are written in the same code and share the same back- end interface. The result is a security solution that not only looks like a single system but functions like one as well. A unified system pro- vides everything security staff need within a single user interface (UI)
to help them effectively and efficiently protect people and assets.
In addition to improving security and operational efficiency, unifi- cation also allows organizations to gain control over all systems from an intelligence and data perspective. By gathering together huge amounts of data into one, single-stream, a unified system makes it possible to transform raw information into invaluable business intel-
ligence across a multitude of departments.
Unification Improves Efficiency
The standard setup for campus security departments using an integrated system usually involves assigning a single responsibility to each operator. While one operator is responsible for watching video, another is in charge of monitoring access control and another looks after parking. Following this structure, each workstation has a central monitor that the operator uses to interface with their assigned system. But, because the systems are integrated together, procedures can become complicated when operators have to move between them to complete tasks.
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