Outsourcing site security: 200 cameras, two operators, thousands of alarms a day

A large industrial or research site can easily run hundreds of cameras. Add access control, fire detectors, and leak and temperature sensors from the building management system. The security control room has two operators per shift. Every day they receive several thousand individual alarms, most of them triggered by wind, animals, changing light or a door someone props open with their foot.

The sensors at sites like these are usually well developed and rarely the bottleneck. In most cases the bottleneck is operations: too few people checking too many unconnected signals by hand.

More cameras, more alarms, the same number of operators

Every new camera and every new sensor generates more alerts. The number of operators does not grow with them. With two people and 200 cameras, each operator watches 100 video feeds, plus the alerts from access control and building systems.

When nine out of ten alarms are false, operators learn to click them away quickly. This is called alarm fatigue. It carries the risk that the genuine alarm, too, is handled late or imprecisely. That rarely has anything to do with a lack of diligence. Nobody can check thousands of alerts with the same attention for eight hours straight.

On top of that, the systems run separately. Video management, access control and building management each have their own interface, their own alarm list and often their own vendor. An operator only notices that two alerts belong together if they see both at the same time and make the connection themselves.

Why new software alone is not enough

The obvious step is analytics software that brings video, access and building systems together. It sorts out false alarms and groups related alerts. That means an alarm is detected, but not yet handled. Handling it is still the job of the site’s own operators, around the clock.

With software alone, the site pays for the license and the rollout, and its own operators remain the bottleneck. Training and regular drills also stay in-house. Whoever hands the control room to a provider that works with intelligent software pays for results, not for licenses.

What we take on

Arcos runs an alarm receiving center (Notruf- und Serviceleitstelle, NSL; VdS 3138), staffed every hour of every day. It runs on Trident, our own control room software, recognized under VdS 3534 and built and operated in Europe.

For a site that outsources all or part of its security, that means:

• Connection without replacement. We connect the existing cameras, access systems and building sensors, regardless of vendor. Trident maps each source once into a single model. Nothing has to be replaced.
• AI pre-filters, a person decides. Before an operator sees an alert, it has been classified and enriched with the object, its history and the related alerts from other sources. A fence alarm arrives with the image from the nearest camera, a badge used in two places at once as its own alert. A trained operator makes the decision.
• An alarm plan that fits the site. Together we define who is informed for which event and who decides on an intervention. Your on-site security team, the guard service or the authorities are alerted through the agreed intervention chain.
• Complete documentation. Every alarm is logged with timestamp, cause, measure and outcome. That is the basis for reporting duties under the KRITIS Framework Act (KRITIS-Dachgesetz) and for the review after an incident.
• Several sites, one control room. Sites with different camera density and different access systems run in the same control room. Companies with several plants can consolidate their security control rooms step by step.

The duty to protect the site stays with you. We take over the ongoing monitoring and the response to it.

Frequently asked questions

Talk to us

Do you run a site with many cameras and few people in the control room? We'll show you what a connection would look like for your site. Get in touch