Building security - Round table discussions

In the analogue era, videotape was the storage media of choice for CCTV systems. Since the advent of digital video, and of IP-based systems, a variety of other storage formats have come to the fore, including hard drives, flash drives, SD cards and others. Now we are in the age of the cloud, which offers new opportunities to store vast amounts of video and presents challenges such as bandwidth and cybersecurity. For a current perspective on storage, we asked this week's Expert Panel Roundtable:...

Finding the exact right technology to solve an end user’s problem is challenging, but the rewards are great when an integrator gets it right. A wide range of available product types, price levels and added features increases the likelihood of identifying a technology to solve any problem. But with so many technology and product choices in the marketplace, identifying that one solution can be akin to finding a needle in a haystack. We wondered whether a vast range of product choices is alwa...

The reviews are in, and ISC West was another hit. Brisk attendance and a comprehensive lineup of the industry’s top companies and products contributed to another successful show for Reed Exhibitions. Our Expert Panel Roundtable, who have attended many such events, added their own reflections to the industry’s post-ISC glow. We asked this week’s Expert Panel Roundtable: How successful was ISC West 2018 for security industry exhibitors and visitors?

A big trade show, such as the upcoming ISC West, has a lot to offer for attendees. How, can attendees maximise the value they get out of ISC West? For advice, we go to our Expert Panel Roundtable, all seasoned veterans of many big trade shows. Specifically, we asked the panel: How can attendees get the most out of a big trade show like ISC West?

The residential/smart home market is undergoing revolutionary transformation, with a flood of new products and technologies helping to make our homes more connected, easier to manage and, yes, smarter. These massive steps forward provide challenges, and also opportunities, for the security industry, which has played a major role in protecting homes and residents for decades. We asked this week’s Expert Panel Roundtable: How are changes in the residential/smart home market impacting securit...

Enterprise customers provide a large, and very lucrative, business opportunity for the physical security market. These customers include big global companies with plenty of revenue to spend and employees and facilities to protect. As a group, enterprise customers also tend to be a demanding lot, requiring systems that are large, scalable, that can operate across a wide geographic area, and that provide top-notch system performance. Enterprise customers set the standards of performance for the en...

The new year presents new opportunities for the physical security marketplace. In many ways, 2018 will undoubtedly see further development of trends we saw in 2017. In fact, some of the trends determining the future of the physical security industry have been in place for many years. However, not every event in 2018 can be foreseen or easily predicted. To be sure, it is sometimes the surprises that keep life interesting! We asked this week Expert Panel Roundtable: What will be the security marke...

It seems there are more “bad things” happening than ever before. We hear news every day of workplace shootings and terrorist attacks, of smash-and-grab thefts and child abductions. Beyond the possible human tragedy involved, such events pose a persistent question to anyone involved in the realm of security: Could we have prevented it? The first step toward prevention is to predict or foresee an event before it happens. Too often, technology enters the picture after the fact, most com...

We have been hearing about smart buildings for more than a decade, but the increasing profile of the Internet of Things (IoT) expands the possibilities for intelligent building systems and makes them even more attainable. Security is often among the “smart” functions of a building, and the capabilities of many physical security systems can contribute in new ways to building intelligence. We asked this week’s Expert Panel Roundtable: What is the impact of “smart buildings&...

Products are the building blocks of systems and solutions. How those products are combined, and where the integration happens, is a variable in the physical security market. Before the advent of open systems, a single manufacturer typically combined his own products, using proprietary connections, into end-to-end solutions for customers. Open systems undermined that paradigm to some degree and made it possible for customers to pick and choose products from multiple manufacturers to be integrated...

Video systems today offer more capabilities than ever. Consequently, the systems can be used in new ways. For a variety of reasons, however, many customers don’t take full advantage of the capabilities of their video systems and therefore are leaving value on the table. Education and training are tools to alleviate the situation, but the first step is to identify the new ways that video can be used. We asked this week’s Expert Panel Roundtable: How do customers under-utilise their vi...

As the new school term begins, awareness of security at all levels of educational institutions is higher than ever. Technology plays an important role in protecting educational facilities and their students, faculty, staff and visitors. Specific security challenges drive which technologies and other measures are used, and those challenges are evolving, along with the dynamic institutions security is tasked with protecting. We asked this week’s Expert Panel Roundtable: What are the security...

The obvious reason to buy security systems is to promote greater security. But in some cases, there are more specific and/or immediate motivators that lead to a security purchase. Everybody wants more security in the abstract, but how willing are we to pay for it? Security is sometimes seen as a “grudge purchase,” competing for tight corporate dollars with other investments that may seem more appealing or urgent. But other times an event occurs that moves security to the top of the l...

A busy trade show abounds with new products and expanded features, colorful signage and blinking video screens, all competing for attention from busy attendees. It’s a microcosm of how the security marketplace – or any market, for that matter – sells its products. But what happens if the reality turns out different to the sales pitch? What happens when product or system performance doesn’t quite live up to the claims? Some would call that hype, and it can lead to disillus...

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) describes standards as guidelines or characteristics for activities or for their results, aimed at achieving the optimum degree of order. They might include product standards, test methods, codes of practice, guideline standards, and management systems standards. In the security marketplace, there are many standards currently used, including those from organisations such as ONVIF, PSIA and ASIS International. Might the value of standardisa...

As security industry buzzwords go, “convergence” is perhaps the best known and most pervasive. We have been hearing about convergence in our market for almost 20 years. We have heard it’s happening soon. We have heard it’s inevitable. And yet, for all the talk of convergence, it has sometimes seemed there has been more talk than action. We wanted to check in with our Expert Panel Roundtable and get their latest takes on this most enduring of industry buzzwords. We asked t...

Lower equipment prices (with less margin) are one industry trend leading more integrators to seek out new sources of revenue. With margins shrinking on lucrative, but unpredictable, “project-based” business, integrators are looking for more revenue stability. One solution is recurring monthly revenue (RMR), which is already common in the related field of alarm monitoring. But where does RMR come from? Creating more RMR also requires that integrators change how they do business, from...

Our society is engulfed in social media, from Facebook to Twitter to YouTube and all the rest. Among other benefits, social media provides an immediate and accessible form of communication. They say that social media is changing everything in our society, so we wondered what specific impact social media might have on the security marketplace. We asked this week’s Expert Panel Roundtable: What role can social media play in the security marketplace and/or as a tool to promote better security...

Does seeing video cameras at a location make you feel safer or less safe? Do you feel better to know that video surveillance is capturing everything that happens, thus discouraging crime? Or do you think: What kind of neighbourhood (or store) is this that needs a CCTV camera watching everything? Do you feel more secure when the security guard at the hotel elevator asks to see your room key? Do airport screenings ease your mind about getting on an airplane with 100 strangers? The “perceptio...

One of the things all security systems have in common is that they depend on human operators, to one extent or another. But how often is the human factor overlooked in product design? Sometimes, more focus is aimed at increasing the functionality of a system, even at the expense of usability. That’s how we get systems that have more capabilities, although accessing that functionality may be hopelessly complex. Creating effective graphical user interfaces (GUIs) is an ongoing challenge for...