How about a product that you don’t even know you need? That was one of the things an old friend of the magazine said to us, which was intriguing enough to lead to a Teams call with the product developer.
The man who set it up was Carl Pace, who we last featured a year ago for his company calendar that featured wildlife around his Norfolk base. We know him as the founder and now chairman of Check Your Security. As that name suggests, what makes Carl different isn’t only that he’s from Australia, or that his background is in IT, but that he stresses the maintenance of your cameras and access control – heck, even keeping count of where all the equipment is. It’s always interesting to have a conversation with Carl who remains keen to stay ‘on the forefront of technology’, from IP networks on.
Closer than humans
It matters because as Carl says early on in our call, cameras are going to look at things a lot closer than any human can, and spot things that even the tasked security guard cannot. Where does that leave, for example, the alarm receiving centre (ARC). And if your equipment is doing ever more, doesn’t that make it even more important to keep track of how well it’s working? What’re the points of failure in the hard drive, are cameras showing the images that you expect them to. As Carl adds: “Don’t wait for a bad surprise,” in a missing person case, or a ‘hit and run’ accident, to find a problem, such as a camera isn’t recording where you hoped it was.
Manual checks on kit can assume painting the Forth Bridge proportions, if a system has thousands of cameras and it takes only a few minutes to check each. Hence Carl is enthusing about diagnostic software from the United States, Ai-RGUS. It uses AI (artificial intelligence) to report on the quality of images from each camera – are they blurry, or tilted? Does video recording have a date and time stamp?
On the cyber side, are passwords (assuming you want them changing every so often) out of date. A user, then, gets a single dashboard (no clicking around on different manufacturers’ dashboards) and if a camera goes down you can re-boot from the dashboard.
More on page 85, of the December 2022 print edition of Professional Security Magazine.
About the firm
We’ve featured Check Your Security’s work at UEA (University of East Anglia), Norwich City FC and Norwich Hospital; among its other clients are Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. Visit checkyoursecurity.com.
