Monitoring News
Every month our Managing Director, Steve Kimber, fills us in on the latest monitoring news.
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Below is an archive of the previous year's monthly columns or click here for earlier news columns.
| September 10 | August 10 | July 10 |
| June 10 | May 10 | April 10 |
| March 10 | February 10 | January 10 |
| December 09 | November 09 | October 09 |
| September 09 | ||
| September 08 | August 08 |
Connections
January 2009
Hello Again,
Happy New Year and welcome to 2009's first edition of Connections.
This time last year we had just relocated NMS to a brand new ARC/RVRC in Altrincham, it seems like it was only yesterday. During 2008 the new centre was certificated by NSI for Intruder, Fire, BS8418 CCTV and also High-Integrity Monitoring, SMS having also increased its scope to include High-Integrity Monitoring.
High Integrity Monitoring is the equivalent of the old BS7042 high security standard, in the event of any part of the ARC or RVRC losing its network infrastructure, signal processing or indeed the ability to occupy the building there is no interruption to any service it provides.
All NSI certificated ARC’s and RVRC’s have some form of contingency plan for starting up in an alternative location, often only substantially meeting the requirements of BS5979, this normally takes the form of a cold or even warm start up and often includes the relocation of staff to the alternative location.
Centres are perceived to be most vulnerable with regard to their communication links to the outside world; however they are equally as vulnerable to fire within, major sickness such as flu and depending on their location an inability to remain in the building due to external influences such as major chemical fires or gas explosions etc.
Whilst the ARC or RVRC is relocating the businesses to reinstate the monitoring service, the time permitted is 28 days for an ARC, who would be providing service to your customers?
ARC’s service levels are also very vulnerable to weather conditions such as heavy storms, winds etc as the volume of alarm activations increase. With a one centre location there is no ability to route traffic to another centre and therefore all the customers suffer degradation in service levels.
In my view a centre that does not meet the High Integrity Monitoring requirements of BS5979 providing uninterrupted levels of service, are balancing the commercial needs of their business against the levels of service they should provide if they are a truly professional 24/7 monitoring service.
With our ARC/RVRC you get continuity of service and two centres for the price of one!
Bye for now,
Steve