Visimetrics Surveillance Solution Watches Over UK Properties

Visimetrics  FASTAR DVRs have been chosen by Standard Life to provide continuous surveillance across their property estate.  FASTAR is a key component of a comprehensive package of measures to ensure the safety and security of staff, customers and data and enables Standard Life to store high quality images locally while keeping bandwidth usage over the corporate network to a minimum.


Standard Life has a significant estate of managed properties within the U.K., including prestigious office locations such as London's iconic Gherkin building.  On-demand access for incident investigation at each remote site is available for authorized users directly from Standard Life's own Alarm Receiving Centre (ARC) in Edinburgh. The "distributed recording" approach to DVR deployment ensures the most efficient use of the network and offers a high degree of fault tolerance. Should the network be unavailable, the ability to record data and provide evidence locally continues without interruption.


"FASTAR is the third generation of DVR to be sourced from Visimetrics by Standard Life," said Craig Howie, Commercial Director of Visimetrics (UK).  "From the outset, the deployment of Visimetrics DVRs within Standard Life properties required network integration as an essential feature. In addition to meeting the security department's requirements for image quality, ease of use and provision of secure, auditable evidence, the DVRs and associated video management "CONTROL" software also had to meet the group's stringent network security requirements."


"We knew the progression to a networked surveillance system would be complex and, without the early commitment of our IT department, achieving the solution we wanted would not be feasible," said Standard Life's Security Manager, Clive Teague. "It was essential to our success that we selected a manufacturer we could work closely with to meet the security and IT needs of the company. Visimetrics has been instrumental in delivering and evolving systems to provide us with the essential tools to monitor our property estate".


"All DVR-associated hardware and software was thoroughly tested and verified by Standard Life's IT department before approval was granted for use across the corporate network," Howie said. "Visimetrics product development team worked closely with Standard Life's IT department to ensure the products were fully compliant to their stringent requirements, allowing the addition of further sites and DVR's to become a standard globally."


More recently, Standard Life has invested in a purpose built ARC to monitor the access control, BMS, fire and intruder alarms and surveillance across their property estate. The monitoring of such a diverse range of equipment required a security management system GUI which meant that a single application provided a graphical representation on the overall security status of the property estate. FASTAR, in this case, allows for visual verification of the alarm source. This level of integration is achieved by a Visimetrics SDK to provide direct access to both live and recorded images for display within the security management system.