Securing your premises

Posted on 26 Oct 2004 at 11:41

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Gallery

Steve Baxter looks at some of the most effective IP-based surveillance equipment around in an attempt to thwart the efforts of thieves and vagabonds

The Problem
Security's a constant concern for anyone with business premises. If you deal in something with a financial value there's always someone out there eager to steal it. Physical security is one way to tackle this, but human rights laws mean that you're as likely as not to end up being prosecuted if your guard dog bites the thief, the electric fence shocks him or the barbed wire snags his new trainers.

Your next line of defence is to prosecute the thief after he's stolen your goods, and that's where CCTV comes in. But CCTV has its problems. It's enormously expensive to install, it requires careful operation and it's far from 100 per cent reliable.

We're now starting to see cases where the quality of the pictures taken by traditional CCTV systems is so low you can't identify the criminals; a blurred image comes into the camera's field of vision, floats across the screen and drifts off again.

If you have to remember to change a tape every day, your security system's impractical. Someone will forget to change it, someone will overwrite yesterday's tape with today's footage and someone will assume a tape that's been overwritten a hundred times still records high-quality video.

We've compared IP telephony to ordinary telephony in early case studies; this month we're comparing ordinary CCTV with the latest IP-based surveillance. IP-based digital CCTV addresses all the limitations of traditional CCTV. It's cheaper to install, records higher-quality video and is easier to operate. But is it really as wonderful as its advocates make out?

Case Study
Hindmarch & Co is a family-run car dealership and petrol station based in Stamford, Lincolnshire. It became a Peugeot dealership in 1972. The business has a five-acre lot that encompasses new and used car sales, a workshop, bodyshop and forecourt. It spans two sites that are quite close together and, from an IT standpoint, are linked by a VPN. It employs around 45 people and sells about 1,000 cars a year.

The company's problems stem from two of the products it sells - petrol and cigarettes. Criminals would do the world a service if they mixed the two and blew themselves to kingdom come, but you can't trust them to do anything right. That leaves the Hindmarch family trying to find ways to deter theft in the first instance and prosecute it in the second.

The Solution
Hindmarch is not new to the idea of CCTV. It had its first CCTV system installed 10 years ago but the passage of time has made it ineffective. Just as an increase in crime was making surveillance more important, the quality of the system deteriorated to such an extent that its output was useless. The police wouldn't accept it as evidence.

Upgrading a system is an unattractive prospect for any organisation because upgrades are so expensive. The thing that convinced Hindmarch was the ever-increasing number of 'runners' from the forecourt - people who fill up with petrol and drive away without paying for it.

The company turned to Ben Howe at Control-Z Computers (www.control-z-computers.com), its existing IT supplier, because Ben had changed the focus of his business from PCs and networking to digital security systems. This is, to us, the most interesting thing about modern CCTV systems: because they're driven through IP, security cameras become a computer peripheral. They're just another device on the end of an Ethernet cable.