“Innovation is seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.”
Dr. Albert Szent-Györgyi
A security system is only as reliable as its weakest component.
Sector N 80 "Security and investigative activities" is both very well known for some of the activities included in it, and insufficiently researched and popular as an economic and commercial activity.
Although in the modern world security services are an integral part of everyday, economic and social life, for years this sector has been neglected, both as an economic activity and from the point of view of legislation and normative definition.
Maintaining an adequate level of security within any society can be seen as a basic (prerequisite) for creating an environment in which citizens and firms are able and motivated to engage in economic activities, and hence for economic growth. In this sense, security is a fundamental public good that generates positive social externalities and is equally, through regulations, associated with negative externalities.
If at the dawn of private security, the sector was identified mainly with physical security, today it is inextricably linked and evolving at the speed of technology. However, as in many other industries, regulatory policy, market requirements and the business environment have lagged behind and have not kept pace with the current needs of the security industry.
A priority in the activities of security service providers is the implementation of innovative solutions aimed at preventing encroachments on the clients' property more effectively.
Security systems and related services have two aspects of operation:
- To identify the security breach or event that is defined as alarming and to raise an alert,
- To respond to the alarm event in accordance with the security protocol for the site - to respond with a patrol, to send police or ambulance, to inform the customer, etc.
The effectiveness of security solutions is maximized if there is a 100% response rate when an alarm event occurs, a minimum false alarm rate, and if the acquisition and maintenance costs are justified by the loss/theft prevented.
Companies operating in the market for security services and solutions are constantly looking for, developing and implementing intelligent systems and flexible working methods that, on the one hand, do not contradict the requirements of the legislation and, on the other hand, make it as difficult as possible to attempt to violate the security of the protected objects - people, property, valuable shipments and cargo, etc.
The trend towards reducing the human factor in security services and replacing it with technology is permanent and it can be said that it has become a criterion for competitiveness among security companies.
In the private security sector, security guards are being replaced by video analytics software that recognizes faces, license plates, the presence of weapons, acts of aggression, crowding, even pickpocketing. It has been established that the human eye gets tired after 20 minutes of video surveillance, as a result of which the necessary concentration is lost. It has also been proven that a person cannot really effectively monitor more than 4 cameras on a single monitor, which makes human video monitoring conservative and insufficiently reliable.
Modern video analysts can control everything - presence or absence of objects that should or should not be in the controlled areas, presence of fire, flood, earthquake, presence or absence of people/vehicles/animals in guarded perimeters, anomalous behavior, compliance with safety rules, customer flow counting, customer service time reporting, movement mapping and other functionalities that, in addition to a security role, also have additional added value for businesses, citizens and society.
Thermal cameras for remote measurement of body temperature also gained great popularity during the COVID pandemic. The integration of the thermal cameras with the access control system eliminates the need for the presence of physical security to perform controlled access mode.
Integrated remote control security systems have emerged, offering a variety of additional functionalities, especially when combined with site-specific analytics software.
Modern technologies have allowed the digitization of traditional security services and such as "smart doorman" and "virtual security" have emerged, including in addition to security and video monitoring of the site, and remote access mode, switching on and off security systems to provide controlled access to the site to individuals , even in the absence of the client.
New security systems with technical security systems (more popular in society as SOT) no longer only guard, but also turn on the heating, air conditioning, lighting or activate the watering of the garden.
As a result of digitalization, we can now turn on and off our home or office security system via cloud technology and mobile phone, as well as monitor video cameras through our phone, no matter where we are. Systems support GSM, Wi-Fi and LAN networks simultaneously. The GSM communicator has all the functionality of a SMART DIALER with the ability to trigger or notify events by calling and/or SMS from/to selected numbers.
In the field of transporting valuable shipments and cargo, new technologies for security and control of activity have also been introduced - setting a certain route and alarming in case of deviation, speed control, signaling in case of unauthorized stopping of the vehicle, engine shutdown in case of robbery attempt, blocking on doors, etc.
Automated processes have also been introduced in the car patrol activity - the information on the state of the guarded objects, the location and the reaction of the car patrols is analyzed - reaction time, route, inspection time. In order to reduce the response time, the location of the object with an alarm event and the available information about it is received directly on tablets in the patrol cars. The software statistical processing of data on locations, routes and response time allows patrol cars to be allocated as efficiently as possible to respond to the geographical concentration of objects and alarm events.
Modern security systems have an intelligent countermeasure system and real-time notification of attempted unauthorized intervention, and automatically take protective action. They provide full data protection through two-way encryption with no options to delete events in order to prevent manipulation and delete information before it is transmitted to the monitoring centers for processing.
The remote software update functions of the security system components enable the companies in the sector to upgrade security systems remotely without customer involvement, as well as to use an intelligent automatic update option from the point of the last interruption - in case of communication failures and errors during update. The ability to remotely maintain and program the entire system allows adaptability to customer busyness and saves time.
Innovations in security are often associated with large costs, but the trend towards their increasingly massive demand and supply shows the current needs of the security services market and the awareness of the efficiency and added value of new technologies. Security companies, for their part, are ahead of trends in market demand and, despite the difficult conditions of the business environment and the existence of inadequate regulatory and administrative burdens, invest in technology, with which they gain a competitive advantage, increase the efficiency of their services and improve the image of the industry for security.
