The lockdown due to coronavirus has meant many sites – offices, factories – have been shuttered. What then for CCTV maintenance? Darren Rewston, MD of CheckMy CCTV, says that in recent weeks his company – which offers maintenance checking software – has been bombarded with inquiries.
Darren’s among exhibitors at the Security TWENTY series of events around the British Isles (Darren is pictured right, talking to visitors at his stand at ST19 Heathrow in November). As he says, the software – for example, checking if a connection to the CCTV system fails, or if a camera has a fault or has been tampered with – allows for remote monitoring of faults and issues (such as, it could be that the system is recording for less than the 31 days, or whatever set by the user, expected).
Then, the installer with the maintenance contract could send an engineer, when they’re needed, rather than sending engineers up and down motorways to carry out routine checks. In any case, if the maintenance contract is on a ‘see you next year’ basis, what’s to say that a camera is not working for months, which can give a site manager a false sense of security. As Darren says, typically a site finds a fault in its CCTV the day after a break-in has revealed it.
Darren told Professional Security: “We are doing a lot of work with monitoring stations – they already have the connections in place; but also installers.”
The attraction of the software to the maintenance installer can be that the product carries out 24-7 checks, and ‘you can react to issues in a proactive manner’. If the CCTV system is networked, there may be no need for a site visit to set up the software, through a hosted solution, paid for monthly.
Meanwhile, the company’s monitoring partner, Nottingham-based EMCS, is extending their CCTV Sentry 24/7 remote maintenance checking service to include non-monitored systems. CheckMy CCTV recently launched the Monitoring Partner scheme.
