Where Should I Place My Security Cameras In My Business? It would seem a rather simple question. Exactly what did you want to see? However yet, there are some elements to consider when designing your camera plan that you may not have considered. I have listed some of the things you might want to cover in a section by section breakdown that you can peruse on a “by application” basis.
Exterior Building Parking Lots: Clearly one of the most popular placements for cameras, parking lots can also be difficult to secure. They are often large areas where targets are undetermined to enter, exit, or travel. Additionally, you are often working with a number of unknowns and variables. This enormous unknown factor means you have to be prepared for something to occur anywhere within this large area. The use of pan tilt zoom, multiple varifocal, and megapixel cameras are common, and combining them is an even more effective way to cover your lots.
Exterior Building Yards: Yard areas are often where a company keeps some of their most expensive assets. Machinery, inventory, and other large and bulk items are kept in these yards. This can be a perplexing situation for security. Ideally cameras focused on specific areas, megapixel cameras, or auto-tracking cameras are excellent options, and of course, combinations of these are even better.
Exterior Building Perimeter: Covering the exterior entrances of a building can be tricky, and if possible shouldn’t be combined with cameras being used to cover yards or lots. The wider the angle of picture used to capture an area, the smaller the objects in that picture appear (and therefore yielding less detail). Therefore, for the sake of detail, you should use separate cameras for these purposes. Obtaining the largest, clearest pictures of persons entering and leaving a building or area is absolutely critical in many situations.
Exterior Building Zone Management and Security: No access and sensitive areas can be managed easily and cost-effective with the right cameras and recorder. Many recorders can be set to send you a text, email, or push notification if there is motion within a certain area of a camera’s field of view. Additionally, Pan Tilt Zoom cameras can be trained to change direction and zoom in and out if there is a motion activation in a certain area.
Exterior Building Vehicle Registration: Capturing vehicle information can be accomplished very easily. The key to this task is more a matter of camera proximity than type. Capturing vehicle information can be very useful to authorities in the event that something occurs on your property.
Interior Building Security: When considering interior camera locations, there are many considerations. Certainly you will want overviews of any area of interest, but there is more than just that to consider. You will want to cover your major entry points. In the case of your home, doing this with a covert camera may give you critical information identifying potential intruders unaware of the camera’s existence. In your business, a super high quality varifocal camera will give you a record of all who enter. You will also want to cover high importance areas with their own camera. Cash registers and counting areas, gun and cash safes, jewelry boxes, and theater rooms can all be perfect situations to place an additional covert or high end camera.
Interior Building Inventory Control: Clearly one of the most important purposes for cameras is to protect the valuables contained within a building. Placing cameras at high traffic areas creates a registry of people entering and leaving the area with inventory. Additional cameras placed in areas of particularly valuable or important items is always suggested as an additional way to account for those items. Another philosophy is to place a camera at the exits to monitor persons as they exit the building.
Interior Building Time Theft Prevention: Keeping watch of your time clock can be far more important than you realize. Its becoming more and more common to find that another employee has been punching the time clock on the behalf of their friend, or employees punching themselves back in from break and then returning to the break room. These are just a few forms of a new crime known as “time theft”. Essentially, its fraud. You could easily lose thousands of dollars at your time clock.
Interior Building Supervisory: Large area overview cameras are gaining popularity these days as well. These cameras assist the business owner in keeping tabs on their employees and the activities they are performing. They can be used to enforce and ensure safety policies are being adhered to, observing and training employees on the job, observing customers/clients for research on behaviors, and enforcement of rules, regulations and standards of your business. Lastly, interior cameras give you piece of mind by giving you the power to simply look and see what exactly is going on while you are away yourself.
Interior Building Monetary Assets Control: In any business there are precious investments that need to be secured. Everything from expensive machines or computers, to safes and registers, to raw inventory, to the very people in the business (customers and employees alike) has/have potential to be stolen or damaged. Keeping an eye on valuable assets is an obvious use for cameras.
Interior Building Entrant Registration: Even though this is the last entry in my camera locations blog, it may actually be the most important. A registry of entries and exits and a detail of the people of the persons coming and going could prove critical in the cases of many events. Placing a camera at each entrance that only views literally the space required to enter or exit the building, and raised to the optimal zone the people’s heads travel through should give you a nice big detailed picture of their face. When paired with an overview camera of the area, you can now track that person based on a) their apparel and look and b) simply going from camera to camera and tracing their movements. If that person is caught on recording stealing, vandalizing, or any other action of interest; you can now simply reverse through the footage until you get to the point where they had entered the building. At that point, you have that nice large image of their face. If there are other confined entry points (like other doorways) that allow access into areas of interest or importance or value, you could place other facial capture cameras as a way to make certain the person is the same, and to get more details about them.
