Think your job is tough? You have it easy compared to this senior surveillance operator for a Fortune 500 company with more than 50 sites all around the world. In this note, we share our exclusive interview and insights into the operational problems and challenges he faces.
Constant Alerts
What makes the job particularly frustrating is that during the day there are almost constant alarms. His whole job is to respond to these alarms and log the causes.
The company has around 50 sites around the world including New York, Texas, South America and Europe, including data centers, warehouses and office buildings. Some sites have as little as three cameras and the biggest has about 40. In all there are just over 1,000 cameras, he said.
“I’m at a desk and I’m surrounded by computer monitors. There is always an alarm going off for sites all around the world. When the alarm goes off, a video stream will pop up an show us where the alarm is going off and then we have to investigate it by reviewing the footage to see what was going on. It gets kind of monotonous after a while,” he said.
Many Alarms Synced to the Camera System
In some cases, like at night or in remote areas, the alarms are motion activated. They also have window break alarms, the company’s executives all have personal panic alarms and some are synced with access control systems.
All False Alarms
More than 99 percent of these alarms are false.
“There are alarms that constantly go off for no reason like when someone walks by or someone opens a door and well tell the sites about it and put a ticket in for it. I suspect they don’t want to pay the money,” he said.
A glass break alarm at one site goes off every time a loud car drives by. The DVR at a site in the US is faulty and at another site few camera views take extremely long to load.
“For some reason we can’t review the video on those cameras but you start to get a feel for which ones you can pull up quickly and which ones are harder ... we just keep those available on the main screens,” he said.
Sometimes the software doesn’t give an alarm when it should, but “nothing really horrible has happened,” he said. “I’ve been here a year and everything has been pretty smooth.”
Outside of faulty equipment there are also “courtesy alarms.”
“For example, after hours if someone opens the main office building door then we get an alarm,” he said. But from there it becomes a judgement call. The company has thousands of employees so it’s impossible for operators at a remote site to know them all.
“We have to guess whether that person is an employee or a cleaning person or a maintenance person so there’s that little bit of room for error. A thief could probably walk in wearing a suit and steal everything and we wouldn’t know until he was walking out the door with all the stuff,” he said.
They get a legit alert about once per month, generally for people vandalizing property, breaking in or often homeless people looking for somewhere to get warm.
A Typical Day
The global command center is located at one of the company's data centers, its most valuable asset.
“It’s like $10 million lost for every minute the data center is down so they have people there 24/7 and critical systems technician and we work pretty closely with. Sometimes we’ll relay [alarm] information to them to go and check it out.”
The shift starts with the day’s briefings, “then we sit down, and we wait for the alarms to start coming in,” he said. “Halfway through my shift the other guard leaves. Then I get all the cleaners setting off the alarms because they don’t have badges, they have keys. Near the end of my shift it totally dies down though and you have more time to review the video when you get alerts.”
Being good at this job means getting good at reviewing video quickly and closing out alerts.
“You just have to stay on top of it. People get overwhelmed by it, but I actually like it because it keeps me awake,” he said.
When An Alarm Is Real
When an alarm is real, the company has a click-through flow chart program that takes and operator through all the response steps for specific incidents from alerting managers to notifying police. The web-based program allows them to enter notes. They export video and attach it to generate an instant report.
False Alarms Cause Intra-Company Animosity
The company's bigger sites have security guards on-site that they can coordinate with. When those guards go on tours they transfer all of their alarms to the global operating center.
“So then we’re constantly calling them to check things out and they don’t understand that we’re trying to help them. They think we’re a big bad watchdog, always watching over them,” he said. He says his managers will get complaints from managers from other sites that they are calling them too often.
Who Can Handle a Job Like This?
A veteran with military surveillance operator experience, he has quickly moved up in the ranks at the company.
He says people usually first train as operators at the global command center to see how proficient they are at it. The people who can handle the amount of alarms coming in get to work at bigger sites. The ones who cannot either do not get the job or get stationed in areas with less going on.
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“We have to guess whether that person is an employee or a cleaning person or a maintenance person so there’s that little bit of room for error. A thief could probably walk in wearing a suit and steal everything and we wouldn’t know until he was walking out the door with all the stuff,” he said.
I gather that no electronic access control is used by this company? If so, there is a strong justification to integrate video and EAC together.
You would think they would at least have authorized employee/contractor pictures available to security staff so they could determine if someone has business at a site or not. How can you even justify closing an alarm if you can't validate who is walking in and out of your buildings and if they should be there in the first place?
No way you can justify closing an alarm without putting an eyeball on it, but sorry Alain that comment about pictures made me laugh out loud. On any given day my company (nowhere near a Fortune 500 company) has roughly anywhere between 1,000-2,000 contract production employees working in our facilities around the world. That is on top of our 7,000 employees. Many of these contract employees come from a sub-vendor of a vendor we employee to staff temporary production spots. Meaning the 1,000 employees that are here this week may not be the same 1,000 next week (luckily the majority are the same week to week, but not month to month). Factoring in the limited Security presence at some of our facilities, the immense turn over in these contract employees and the time/cost of trying to get an actual photo of each it is not even remotely feasible.
While this does not sound like a manufacturing company you have to figure between deliveries, contractors, hilo/lift drivers, custodial, food services, etc. etc. etc. they have the same issue. Plus if they will not even pay to fix a glass break no way they are going to pay for pictures and staff to manage the database.
Ross - I realize that this can be a challenge for any company, but I'm speaking to these cases specifically described in the interview:
“For example, after hours if someone opens the main office building door then we get an alarm”
How many <edit> authorized <edit> people could we reallistically be talking about here? Probably not that many.
As far as securing access to production facility where thousands of contract workers walk in and out at all times of day, that's a whole other ball of wax. Keycard with narrow revolving door access to prevent piggybacking are frequently used in those types of environments and don't usually require much supervision unless the access equipment fails, althought I'm not sure how that's handled in the environments you're referring to.
Keycards would also likely do away with most, if not all, of the alarms in the cases described above.
It sounds to me as if they have several issues going on here.
A good systems review and upgrade would probably solve most of them but I'm guessing this company, in its great wisdom, like many others, figures its cheaper to pay three grunts per day in a control center, chasing after ghosts most of the time, than to spend to resolve the issues mentionned in the interview.
Until the proverbial shit hits the fan hard enough.
... this company, in its great wisdom, like many others, figures its cheaper to pay three grunts...
Grunts might be a bit harsh for someone who was nice enough to provide us this information, no?
I didn't mean it in a bad way, more with regards to the way this company is treating these guys with its lousy security implementation. He could be doing much more interesting work if he didn't have to waste eight hours a day on futilities.
No worries. :)
As in "...figures its cheaper to pay three possibly over-qualified professionals to perform grunt work..."
I'm part grunt myself so I'm probably just over sensitive... ;)
