10 Aug 2006

Overview

The Dunfermline Building Society has 32 branches across Scotland.  All are equipped with CCTV systems although these were using analogue time lapse VCR's to record.  Against the backdrop of a recent IT network upgrade, the society wanted to migrate the existing CCTV systems over to a digital recording system which could also make use of the societies IT network.

Requirements

The primary project requirements were as follows:

— Improve recorded image quality.

— Integrate the CCTV with the existing Intruder/Panic Alarm systems.

— Provide network access to both live and recorded CCTV images.

— Provide evidentially robust footage for the police.

In addition to the above, further requirements were to eliminate any necessity for intervention by branch staff and to ensure the equipment complied fully with the organisations IT policy, both from a data protection and network security standpoint.

Project implementation

In the first instance, the High Security division of integrator ADT undertook a survey of all premises concerned to review the CCTV generally and asses it's readiness for digital upgrade.  Recommendations were made regarding camera additions and upgrades where applicable.

A comprehensive survey report was produced, from which the required hard disk capacity required for the DVR at each branch was calculated.

At this stage, the IT department provided full details of all IP properties required (IP address, gateway etc), as well as their approved anti-virus software.  From this, Visimetrics were able to produce a DVR for each individual branch, even delivering it to ADT labelled as such.

The anti-virus software will continue to update itself throughout the lifetime of the equipment, ensuring the DVR's are always kept within Dunfermline's IT security framework.

A further benefit of close collaboration with the IT department has been the inclusion of network timing software, so the time and date generator within each digital recorder is "locked" to the societies corporate wide time source derived from its main server.  This will provide major benefit to the audit teams, who will be able to match CCTV footage exactly with transactions.