Securing your Infrastructure - some considerations for your buildings, factories, plants and offices
Infrastructure is the I of PIE, the acronym we use at Isle Systems to describe our customer requirements when they have concerns about protecting their business. The P is people and the E is equipment. In this blog post we talk about your infrastructure: the areas you need to think about, and how your alerting systems should work with other systems to give you a unified approach to security and safety.
Infrastructure threats and alerting
When we talk about your infrastructure we’re thinking about the buildings that house the things or people that produce your good and services. These might be offices, schools, factories, various manufacturing plants, offshore installations, warehouses and transportation systems. The security of these properties is paramount because they contain your physical and human assets, which you have a commercial and legal obligation to protect from harm and keep productive. Your infrastructure needs alarm systems to protect against a range of threats. Adverse weather, climate or ground conditions, trespassing, unauthorised entry, intrusion, fire, leaks, contamination, explosion risk, flooding, terror threats, damage from vehicles: all of these situations and more have the potential to affect the well-being of your staff and your company. Location of the threat is important too. You need to know exactly where the source of the problem is, and you need to know instantly, so that you can respond quickly and effectively. You should consider systems which specialise in mapping and pinpointing the location of all your alarm and detection devices, using your building and site drawings. Then you can display this precise information to your responders.
Unify your monitoring, alerting and communications
If we generalise around fire alarms and intruder alarms, for each system you need to think about monitoring, alerting and communication. If these two systems are separate, then you have two different systems to worry about. Furthermore, when you add the systems you use to safeguard your key workers or lone workers, and perhaps also your key equipment and machinery, then you’re looking at a range of disparate systems, all of which need to be managed. Perhaps each system comes from a different supplier, under a different contract, which means you have a range of companies you need to manage, along with all the systems. Doing all this can easily suck up most of your working week, and you probably have a long list of other essential work to get through as well. Fortunately, there is something you can do to improve this situation, and to improve your productivity and those of your staff who look after security and health & safety. Providers like Isle Systems can bring together your fire alarm system, intruder alarm system and other sensor systems into a centralised monitoring console. When you integrate your infrastructure protection system into one centralised hub you have one place to go for the processing and communication of all your alerts. As a result you save time on management and monitoring of the systems, and you can respond more quickly to alerts because everything happens in the one place. To discuss how you can bring your infrastructure alarm systems into centralised monitoring, alerting and communications hub, please contact us.
