CCTVIma g e
Scalability Even if you don’t have the resourc-
es of the Secret Service or other US Federal agency, you can still benefit from PSIM. It’s all a question of mak- ing the best use of the CCTV, alarm panel, access control and other inputs at your disposal. “The solutions are flexible in scale,”
John Gill, Vidsys
he said. “We have customers that range from large organisations such as the Secret Service or large government organisations, and we have customers that scale down to small government
organisations and private companies that may not have as many sensor inputs into an operations centre but still need to get the same type of situational awareness and correlation of data that a large organisation would.” One of the key ways that organisations, large and small, can
benefit from PSIM is proactive sharing of security data, Gill said. VidSys creates tailored solutions for various industry sectors and looks for ways to make it possible to integrate security data between different organisations. For instance, in the aviation sector, there are myriad organisa-
tions including the airlines, airport operator and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). With PSIM, all of these organisations could share information and raise alerts based on pre-defined criteria. Or the scenario might be even more complex than that. “Say for example, there’s an urban area with three airports around
it and let’s say you had an exit breach at one airport that raises an alarm in an airport operations centre. That may in and of itself not be a situation that rises to a level of concern – you need to address that situation but it may only be a one-off. But let’s suppose that at the same time, at the two other airports there are exit breaches that happen at or about the same time,” he said. “Under a traditional scenario, those might have been three sepa-
rate breaches that wouldn’t have raised a concern beyond needing to be addressed themselves but a PSIM solution such as VidSys could align those security situations and raise the potential of this being a more concerted situation that needs to be addressed.” However, it’s important to remember that PSIM is a means for
highlighting potential threats – the final threat analysis will be made by a human operator who will also be responsible for initiating the appropriate response.
Emergent threats How would a PSIM solution have helped John Gill do his job at the
Secret Service? “The agency always viewed technology from the perspective that
it had to support the operational needs and address emergent threats. As threats evolve and become more complex, the agency has to evolve in turn and use technology in a way that helps support that – as they move into an environment where threats are now much more sophisticated, from an environment where they were mainly looking out for lone gunmen to now living in a world where there are multi- ple threats, ranging from a lone gunman to much more sophisticated and coordinated potential threats,” he said. And he added that the Secret Service often has to work with a
large number of other organisations, including “state, local and fed- eral security entities, law enforcement entities, intelligence entities and military and political and other interested parties”. “This is just the kind of environment that VidSys excels at, to be
able to support a collaboration across these complex environments and to be able to present a situational awareness picture that helps enhance their ability to make effective decisions.”
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