VIDEO SURVEILLANCE
A guide to the technologies and trends shaping the market
Investigation & Surveillance, two essential tools in your toolbox.
Investigation and Surveillance services are two critical tools to support and resolve problematic or contentious situations faced by different markets. Having security tools is good, but knowing how to use them is better. Read below to discover how GardaWorld experts ensure these tools are used properly throughout the corporate, insurance and litigation markets.
Investigation & Surveillance Services for the Corporate Market
The workplace is complex and challenging for many businesses. While conducting operations, a business may encounter a multitude of situations that can be detrimental to the brands, shareholders, employees and could even result in a loss. To combat these harmful situations, investigation and surveillance tactics provide necessary evidence to safeguard business interests. By ensuring compliance with surveillance, a company entrusts an investigation mandate to security experts. At GardaWorld, from large multinational conglomerates to small entrepreneurs, we have the expertise to help companies meet all their investigative needs. Our professional investigators are committed to conducting thorough and detailed investigations to ensure our clients have the best information available. You need information to see the whole picture.
Let GardaWorld identify and provide optimal services to ensure you have complete control over your operations and keep risks to a minimum.
Protecting the Supply Chain
In our global economy people depend on the movement of goods and materials to keep the world going. The sheer amount of goods in constant motion gives thieves the opportunity to disrupt the supply chain.
GardaWorld has a dedicated Cargo Crime Unit to assist in planning the best way to secure your goods through detailed security audits and risk analysis. The team also provides rapid response to loss situations where theft or malfeasance has occurred. Our cargo crime unit has great success in recovery of stolen equipment and good.
Surveillance & Investigation Services for the Insurance Market
The insurance industry is a complex field in which insurers must remain vigilant and alert to any fraudulent claims. To do so, the insurer bears the burden of proof, and which can be very rigorous. Whether it be accident benefits, bodily injury, life, fidelity/ bond, disability or auto/property claims, insurance companies can use the services of investigators to verify or prove the accuracy and details of the insured’s claim.
Partnering
with GardaWorld’s experts allow insurers to benefit from expertise with fast, efficient execution of the investigation which ultimately keeps costs low. Our reports are designed to provide the investigative findings in clear and concise terms for easy reference by the adjuster.
Surveillance Services for the Litigation Market
At GardaWorld, Investigators work hand in hand with lawyers and legal staff to provide valuable information that contributes to case proceedings through investigation and planned surveillance tactics. Whether it be a civil, criminal, corporate or commercial, family, estate, international, intellectual property, or other type of case, it is critical to have a team of professional experts who can adapt accordingly and discretely provide sensitive information. By outsourcing your investigation and surveillance to a security partner, legal personnel can focus on their client, their case and get facts related to the legal action.
INNOVATION IN OVERDRIVE
Smarter access control and video as a business intelligence tool are just two of the major trends gaining momentum in recent years
By Neil Sutton
Brian McIlravey stepped back from the security industry in 2018 and returned just a few months ago.
He spent more than 10 years in policing and 16-plus years in leadership roles at incident management company PPM (which became Resolver via an acquisition in 2015) before joining Igloo Software, an intranet and digital workplace company, as vice-president of customer experience. McIlravey returned to security full-time last year as the chief operating officer of RightCrowd, a pro-
vider of security and compliance solutions including access control, visitor management and contact tracing.
How did the security industry change in the three years McIlravey was away? The obvious answer is the pandemic — the one, sweeping factor that has altered the way business is done across almost all industries. But more than that, security is on an evolutionary path that has acceler-
ated in recent times, notes McIlravey.
“I can’t believe the amount of technology that has changed in three years,” he says, citing the growing influence of the cloud on security products and services, as well as the technical sophistication of today’s security robots (McIlravey is also a member of Robotic Assistance Device’s advisory board).
“The old-school ways of security are just starting to disappear,” he says.
“The old-school ways of security are just starting to disappear.”
— Brian McIlravey, RightCrowd
Confronting access chaos
Back in the saddle of the security business, McIlravey’s attention is now focused on workforce access management and battling perceptions of access as simply an all-or-nothing proposition. “I think the whole concept of access control has to change from the card either works or it doesn’t,” he says.
There are many layers of security beyond the access card, he explains, which can dictate when and where that card is able to grant access and what specific doors it will open. McIlravey’s company RightCrowd provides what he calls a workflow layer that can help an end user establish rules, such as which days an employee’s card will grant access and to which specific office location, based on an agreed upon schedule.
This type of technology has taken on a much greater level of importance during the pandemic, notes McIlravey, as employers are compelled to follow strict guidelines around capacity limits, social distancing and the potential for virus exposure.
RightCrowd offers a lanyard-based product that makes these distinctions even clearer — the wearable acts as a sort of holster for an access card, is colourcoded to indicate access permission and will dynamically change colour based on circumstance.
A contact-tracing element is integrated into RightCrowd’s offering — the wearable will flash yellow if one employee gets too close to another, and will flash red if that distance is closer than three feet. A contact-tracing incident is also logged into a report if this occurs.
RightCrowd will also integrate with an attestation form, i.e. an employee’s acknowledgement of current health status, as well as the days or hours they plan to work in the office.
The pandemic may have accelerated this trend of more sophistication in access control, says McIlravey, but it was already well underway. For example, the onus is on an organization to cancel access rights for employees who have quit or been terminated.
“It’s way more common than we think,” says McIlravey. “Think of that risk: if one of those people comes back into the
“It makes good business sense to understand how your visitors, your customers, your guests are navigating spaces.”
— StephanieWeagle, BriefCam
workplace and causes an event or an incident … could you have known or should you have known that person shouldn’t have access? Well, the answer is yes, and it’s a massive liability risk.”
It’s a matter of addressing what McIlravey calls “access chaos.”
“There’s so many people, so many cards, so many access rights, so many layers — people are going to have to start tackling it very, very soon.”
Next level analytics
Stephanie Weagle, chief marketing officer at BriefCam, joined the company four years ago, and in that time has seen a marked transition in how its products are used and by whom.
“When I joined BriefCam, more than 80 per cent of our business was done within law enforcement, within the safety and security use-cases,” says Weagle. Today, security is closer to 50 per cent of the overall business due to steep growth in video analytics for operational and marketing applications.
“It makes good business sense to understand how your visitors, your customers, your guests are navigating spaces, where the bottlenecks are, [and] some of their behaviours moving through spaces,” she says.
“From our perspective, the biggest shift that we’ve seen in the last year or two, and where we see the shift continuing to evolve over time, is really beyond safety and security.”
A decade ago, the video analytics industry might have been accused of overpromising and under-delivering, says Weagle, but those criticisms are “a distant memory today.”
Conversations with clients are also easier since many of the advantages of the technology are self-evident and typically well understood.
“Certainly the advances in deep learning research and certainly the overwhelming amount of cameras and devices that are out there collecting data at any given moment is really transforming the space,” she says.
Video analytics are also being used to drive business intelligence, which means the customer might be the marketing department rather than security.
“We’re seeing that once the operational folks are understanding what video analytics can do for them and their environment, they’re footing the bill,” says Weagle.
“So the safety and security teams are getting the benefit of video analytics as they typically would, but other departments are paying for it. It’s a very interesting dynamic.”
Similar to access control, video analytics have also adapted to changing conditions created by the pandemic.
The technology’s facility for detection has been useful in terms of mask mandates, social distancing and contact tracing, says Weagle, which ultimately helps retailers, transportation hubs and other industries get back to business.
Pandemic hanging on
While COVID has accelerated the development of some technologies (access control and video analytics to enable smoother transitions between working on- or off-site, or periods of lockdown), the security industry is still facing the same headwinds as many other businesses. The supply chain crunch, for example, may be taking a toll.
“The pressure on semiconductor production in particular is both unprecedented and pronounced and that has been much discussed, but costs are also up across the board, for everything from shipping to raw materials to components such
as cases, cables, lenses, and packing materials, so it’s a real issue,” states Owen Kell, senior IoT research associate at Memoori, in a recent market report. “These costs will eventually get passed onto customers if they aren’t starting to be already.”
“The challenges we face in this industry are not all that different than other companies are experiencing,” adds Tim Grose, remarking that equipment with computer chips is subject to shortages. (Grose, who recently joined Kandor Management Corp. as chief revenue officer and was previously vice-president of sales at Allied Universal Technology Services, responded to questions via email.)
On the upside, however, clients are also aware of these supply chain challenges, which may in some cases lead them
to reach decisions more quickly when it comes to security installs.
“Integrators and media are notifying the customers of these issues and forcing them to be more proactive with the procurement of these parts,” says Grose, “… so what might seem like a problem could actually be a nice uplift in sales.”
According to Kell, the prevailing wisdom from supply chain pundits on when these shortages might end is anywhere from six months to the remainder of 2022.
He notes, however, that there is talk of the potential for long-term supply chain resilience due to increased “‘re-shoring’ or increased regionalisation of production capacity,” but there is little evidence at the moment of that change occurring within the security industry.
“Making profound changes to the supply chain of any industry is not an easy process,” says Kell, adding that companies can spend decades cultivating partner and supplier relationships. “So if change does come, we expect it to be more noticeable over a five to 10 year period, rather than in the next 12 months.”
A more immediate concern, says Grose, is the availability of workforce to go on site for security installs.
Installers have generally been able to gain site access throughout the pandemic by working during off-peak hours, but vaccination requirements have complicated the process. “This has caused some issues and shortages of labour when workers refuse to be vaccinated,” says Grose. “This starts a downward spiral that leads to delays for completion, less availability of qualified workers and overall anxiety to realize revenue on projects.”
Pace of change
There are so many factors to consider today that making predictions about the security industry is perhaps a more onerous task than it might have been only a few years ago. But it’s also reasonable to say that the health crisis has amplified and accelerated some trends that were already in motion, whether that’s cloud adoption, smart access control, or video surveillance as a business intelligence tool.
Kell’s report notes that the physical security market is predicted to grow almost 12 per cent year-on-year in 2021 — about twice the rate of the global economy.
“The upgrading to newer IP technology has opened new avenues [for end users] to gain insights into parts of their business that were only available by way of third-party reports,” notes Grose. “This is giving them real time assessments to make decisions.”
As the value proposition changes, so does the expertise required today to successfully sell security solutions. Grose adds that effective integrators may need insight into all aspects of a customer’s business in order to capitalize on this transition. “The team that brings the best knowledge base to the table stands the best chance to win the deal,” he says.
RightCrowd offers a contact tracing tool via its digital badgeholder technology that utilizes Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). The wearable detects when employees are closer than six feet and indicates the interaction with a colour change on the device.
COMMIS SION AIRES
CYBERSECURITY
CANADA'S PREMIER SECURITY SERVICES PROVIDER
Discover how our experienced Commissionaires du Québec team can become your armour in the face of cyber threats. Our cybersecurity services and arsenal of solutions include monitoring, defence, investigation and training tools based on the most recent advances in cybersecurity.
Specialized in defensive security (blue team), our team can monitor your network, servers, websites, endpoints, clouds, industrial control systems as well as your smart devices and Internet of Things (IoT).
Our experts possess various certifications recognized in the cybersecurity sector (CySA+, GSEC, CEH) and have worked in various vertical markets over the course of their careers. Our IT and data security solutions are world class and adapted to this ever-changing sector.
VULNERABILITY ASSESSMENT
Discover the potential holes in your website or your IT park before malicious digital pirates do. Our vulnerability detection application prioritizes potential risk, defending you beforehand.
// Vulnerability scan on a customized frequency basis with Taegis VDR
// Automated discovery of new devices with a network offering visibility on your access doors
// Creation of remediation plans;
// Prioritization of discovered vulnerabilities in relation to their context and severity
// Solution powered by machine learning, artificial intelligence and data science
// Deployment of treatment services on-site, on the cloud or by virtualization
SURVEILLANCE AND INTRUSION DETECTION
With access to our Security Operations Center (SOC), our cybersecurity analysts study the deepest corners of your network to prevent and block digital threats. You are thus protected from losing control of your sensitive information and from cyber attacks via our IT monitoring service
// Team of analysts specialized in responding to cyber incidents
// Prevention and detection services based on signatures;
// Detection tool and detailed oral response to network security events, IoT or cloud on a unique dashboard
// Escalation process and incident verification (sorting, surveillance, reports)
// Anonymous threat sharing system
//
CYBERSECURITY AND THREAT ANALYSIS
Protect your employees and resources thanks to our team of cyber investigators. Our data and social network as well as dark web analysis including our automated threat alerts become your digital armour in cyber monitoring.
// Navigation of the dark web and deep web for corporate information or sensitive personal data from open sources (OSINT)
// Detection of data leaks or dumps unique to your organization
// Forensic services and cybersecurity analysis (malicious software) in a controlled and isolated environment (lab)
// Certified private investigators by the Bureau de la sécurité privée (Bureau of Private Security) for infiltration and investigation
// Privileged contact among provincial and federal police forces
CONSULTATION SERVICES, TRAINING AND CONFERENCES
Would you like customized training, are looking for conference speakers or have specific needs that require the utmost discretion? Our cybersecurity solution specialists will know how to create a proposal customized for you.
// Customized training relating to IT security, governance, cyber resilience, and data security (Bill 64 and Bill C-11)
// Workplace conferences concerning the best practices including issues more specific to cybersecurity
// Guidance during cybersecurity audits to obtain certifications (ISO 27001/27002, PCI DSS, NIST)
LEARN MORE
contact@cccmtl.ca
A Spectrum of New Possibilities with ColorVu + X
ColorVu with (“+”) Hikvision’s advanced technology (“X”), such as panoramic viewing functionality, delivers 24/7 vivid colour surveillance, even in complete darkness
Hikvision’s advanced technologies ColorVu + X cameras render clear imaging with vivid details for video evidence, improved alarm accuracy for real security threats, and video search efficiency, taking your security above and beyond what was previously possible.
Darkness has been a blind spot for surveillance equipment in the past, but Hikvision’s ColorVu technology captures vivid, full panoramic details in dark corners, shadows and low-light situations.
Panoramic Cameras – a Highlight of ColorVu + X
Panoramic cameras are now available with ColorVu to harness pioneering pixel-level image registration technology to stitch together a 180-degree viewing capability. Wide-area security footage helps improve situational awareness and reduces the amount of cameras required for comprehensive monitoring, aiding cost efficiency.
What is ColorVu + X?
The + X is a series of innovative technologies that elevate and complement ColorVu’s already vivid colour imaging capabilities.
ColorVu + Panoramic
Expanding the boundaries of brilliance with a full 180-degree horizontal view, a true market pioneer to deliver brilliant and seamless panoramas with more lively details.
ColorVu + Varifocal
Changeable focal lengths for more flexibility
ColorVu + 4K
Capture richer, more colourful details with fluid preview and playback
ColorVu + Live Guard
Day and night protection, providing visual and auditory warnings on-site and in real-tim
ColorVu + Deep Learning
Smarter detection around the clock, taking alarm accuracy and search efficiency to a whole new level
Cutting-Edge Technology and Sensors
What gives ColorVu cameras such brilliant imagery? Every camera features a F1.0, super-aperture and a 4MP 1/1.8” advanced sensor that is further enhanced with Backside Illumination (BSI), Dual Conversion Gain (DCG) and Wide Dynamic Range (WDR) technologies to ensure bright and colourful imaging in virtually all conditions.
ColorVu also features Active Alignment Technology which adds an additional layer of quality control during the production process and guarantees focusing performance, ensuring superior reliability for every camera in the field.
Harnessing the Power of AI
In addition, AcuSense utilizes Motion Detection 2.0, meaning minimal false alarms triggered by weather and light changes. End users will appreciate reduced time and disruption searching video clips for specific events. AcuSense also produces quick, smart and reliable alarms for users to filter targets, improving alarms that better indicate and classify moving targets.
ColorVu + X technology elevates Hikvision cameras, not only delivering vivid colour video 24/7 but also adding a series of technologies that guarantee better and wider imaging, more details, smarter surveillance control, and deliver unmatched value to the security market.
Security Control Room Productivity
Furniture Makes a Difference
For security professionals around the world, the control room is arguably the most important tool needed to successfully complete the job. A well-built control room is an extension of the operator, providing optimal support through purposeful design and advanced technology.
Comfort, durability, ergonomics, technical features—these are all important considerations that need to be assessed when selecting security control room furniture. Engineering an effective control room takes knowhow and support.
Office Furniture Versus Technical Furniture
When building a control room, it’s important to understand the difference between technical furniture and run-of-themill office furniture.
Quality, durability, cable management, easy access, and ergonomics are key differentiators between average office desks and technical furniture.
Quality and Durability: Typical office furniture is used 2,080 hours a year, where control room furniture is used 8,760 hours a year.
Technical furniture is built for durability and is typically found in intensive, operational environments, such as emergency dispatch centers and control rooms, which utilize the workstations 24/7, 365 days a year. This type of furniture must be up to the task; the quality of its surfaces, hardware components and accessories must perform at a level that exceeds the expectations of a typical desks.
When regular office furniture is exposed to atypical use, such as in 24/7 operations, you can expect premature wear and tear, resulting in additional costs.
Cable Management: Traditional office furniture typically only has keyboards, a mouse and monitor cables to house and manage. On the other hand, a continuous workspace has very large cable challenges.
Technical furniture is best suited for housing and managing large quantities of computer, audiovisual, communications or medical equipment and the associated peripherals. Unlike traditional office furniture, technical furniture is equipped with advanced cable management systems. This
helps reduce clutter in your control room and makes it easier to access and move equipment.
Easy Access: With so much technology and peripherals being packaged into technical furniture it’s imperative that there is easy access to cables, plugs, CPU’s, monitors that are essential to running the business. This is often overlooked and without easy access valuable time can be lost trying to add new piece of technology.
Ergonomics: The most significant difference between office furniture and technical furniture is ergonomics. Traditional office furniture is designed to support users during a typical eight-hour workday. Technical furniture, on the other hand, is built specifically for 24/7 environments and is engineered to support operators in industries where focus and productivity are critical. Proper ergonomics leads to superior situational awareness, allowing operators to keep their mind in the game.
Finding the Right Console
When building or updating a security control room, you must assess room size, number of operators and technical needs (e.g., monitors, table space, etc.). You can start this assessment and your design process by using tools such as Winsted’s free WELS software. WELS is a user-friendly program that lets control room managers quickly design a solution that meets their needs.
Winsted’s new Vue Workstation is easily configurable for all environments and comes in static or height-adjustable options. These configurable workstations offer different widths and connecting cabinets for multi-operator solutions.
The Sightline Console is the ultimate in configurable and modular design and is offered in static or height-adjustable versions, as well as two different console depths. These configurable consoles come with concave and convex corners to create solutions that fit any room size.
Both the Vue Workstation and Sightline Console offer multiple work surface options, cable management, and open or closed design.