As a business leader, you’ve likely found yourself increasingly concerned with security issues which could bring your enterprise to its knees. And this anxiety is only natural. Your business faces potential security issues 24 hours a day, 7 days a week: whether this is in the form of more sophisticated cyberattacks and even physical threats.
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Therefore, as your business grows, your security measures need to grow alongside it. Security must be a priority: throwing together an improvised security plan is no plan at all, which is why proactively having a reliable protection system in place is absolutely crucial. There has been a lot of buzz surrounding integrated security systems, but for all the excitement, they may not actually be the best solution for your security needs. Let’s talk about it.
What is an Integrated Security System? Where do they fall short?
The first thing you need to know about an integrated system is what exactly they are. Traditionally, businesses may use individual elements for each sector of security they need: one system for surveillance, another for access control, yet another for audio warnings, and so on. The idea is that an integrated system brings all aspects of a company’s security into one place.
Proponents of some integrated security solutions will likely boast about their efficiency, their options for customization, and even perhaps about their ease of use. In a perfect world, this sounds great, but we all know this is an imperfect world (which is sometimes illustrated by our need for high-level security systems). While integrated security systems can promise all those things, they can have one glaring weakness: it strives to function as one system.
How can that go astray? Well, as an example, imagine a business wants to integrate the burglar alarm with their access control so that when a user arrives and presents an access control credential, the alarm disengages. In theory, this sounds great, but what happens if an employee loses their card and doesn’t tell HR for a day or two because they’re looking for it? Perhaps a person outside your company with bad intentions finds the card and uses it to both unlock the door and disarm the alarm system. Suddenly, that person has bypassed two levels of security. Now, if you have these two systems separated, that may not mitigate the risk of someone losing a card and gaining access to the building, but they won’t know the code for the burglar alarm.
There is rarely a one-size-fits-all solution to your security needs.
Customized options with an easy-to-use UI may be attractive for people looking at integrated security systems, but the truth is that sometimes it may be beneficial to run systems separately. Most security solutions offer customizable User Interfaces anyway, but we’ve also found that most manufacturers are not the master of every type of security system: each manufacturer specializes in one or sometimes two specialized offerings.
Now, none of this is to say that integrated solutions are a lost cause—far from it. The fact of the matter is that for some businesses, depending on their unique situations, the integrated approach is the most efficient path towards security. For example, we’ve partnered with Avigilon, a Motorola subsidiary, to integrate video surveillance and access control to provide video notifications for instances of doors opening.
When it comes to your security systems and keeping your business and its assets secure, there is rarely a one-size-fits-all approach. Each business in every city in the world has different needs, so don’t settle for such a system without seeing a full demonstration of its capabilities. For all your tailormade, specialized security solutions, the team at Vermillion Systems is ready to make your business safer. We offer and demonstrate a host of unique security solutions to complement our design build services.
