Making security audits a function of response
Command center managers tell us that writing post action reports, finding video footage, making sure operators followed procedures, are the bane of their job. Whether it’s post action reports, a SitRep, Event Audits, or Shift Reports, they all take valuable time to collect, collate, edit and then distribute.
It’s not just the time it takes to create these reports and audits, it’s the fact that the structure of this data is inconsistent across systems. Video systems don’t record exactly what cameras the operator looked at 7:28 last night. Alarms from different systems have different priority scales, in one system its 0-10 in another it’s 1-100. Reconciling this disparate data is also time consuming but more importantly it makes it difficult for Security Executives to make “apples to apples” comparisons when making decisions.
From the first release of our response platform Immix, over 15 years ago, we have been recording everything an operator Saw, Said and Did in a multimedia audit trail. The purpose of this audit trail is to automatically record all the operator actions in the background as they respond to an event. This record delivers multiple benefits:
- It retains a log of exactly what the operator did in their response–what cameras they looked at, what they said, what actions they took
- It standardizes all the data coming from multiple systems into a consistent format
- It tracks the timing of all of these actions which provides baseline metrics for management reporting
Every event, no matter how critical or insignificant, is recorded. By eliminating the manual steps of capturing and reconciling this data additional automated steps can be triggered to generate reports on demand. What has historically been a burden for managers now provides an opportunity to use this event data to quickly identify areas where response performance can be enhanced with the goal of improving overall security response.
