Sector
Transport & mobility
Thousands of people an hour, a building that never fully closes, and a request that names one minute out of a day. We design and maintain security for terminals, depots and transport facilities in Mumbai: specified for volume, both of people and of footage.
Transport systems are judged on throughput and on evidence at the same time. Anything that slows movement will be bypassed within a fortnight, and anything that does not produce usable evidence has failed at the only moment it was needed.
What actually goes wrong
The problem is not coverage. It is finding one minute in ten thousand hours.
| What fails | Why it fails | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Search takes hours because there is no search | Hundreds of cameras and a system that only plays back. | A request names a time and a place. Somebody scrubs for half a day. |
| Retention traded away for camera count | Storage sized after the camera schedule was fixed. | Two hundred cameras holding eleven days. Requests routinely ask for more. |
| Coverage designed for the concourse, not the edges | The public areas were specified. Service routes, plant and back-of-house were not. | Incidents happen at the edges and the edges have least coverage. |
| Camera and access clocks disagree | Multiple systems commissioned by multiple contractors. | Two records of one event, minutes apart. |
| Contractor and concessionaire access uncontrolled | Hundreds of temporary people across dozens of businesses inside your building. | The largest population in the building has the least record. |
| PA covers the concourse and not the platform | Specified by area rather than by where instructions have to be understood. | An announcement people can hear and not act on. |
One minute in ten thousand hours
The request names a time and a place. Everything depends on what happens next.
A terminal records more footage in a day than most buildings record in a year. That is not an advantage. It is the problem, because every request that arrives asks for a fragment of it, and the system either finds that fragment in minutes or it takes somebody a day.
Requests here are not occasional. They arrive from police, from insurers, from operators and from the public, continuously. Each one is a person's time, and the difference between a system that can be searched and one that can only be played back is measured in weeks of staff time every year.
That difference is decided at design, not afterwards. Adding search to a system that was not specified for it is a rebuild.
Check how long my facility takes to answer a requestWhat we carry here
- Surveillance and search
- Concourse, platforms, entries, service routes, plant and back-of-house
- Retention sized after the request pattern is understood, not after the camera count is fixed
- Search by time and place, so a request is minutes rather than a day
- Command & integration
- One platform rather than several windows
- Export as a documented procedure anybody on shift can follow
- Clocks synchronised to one source across every system
- Access control
- Staff, contractors, concessionaires and operators as separate populations
- Credentials that expire, in volume, without an administrator per contract
- Records retained and reportable
- Fire & life safety
- Detection and evacuation for large numbers of people who do not know the building
- PA specified for intelligibility on platforms and concourses, in the order people must move
- Tested and recorded rather than certified once
Building management is usually already in place and specified separately.
The same six stages
Everything here is at a scale that changes the design rather than the quantity.
- 01 Outside the gate Approach roads, drop-off, parking. High volume, continuous.
- 02 Entry Open by design for the public. Controlled for everybody else.
- 03 Inside the building Concourse, platforms, lifts, service routes. Continuity across a very large footprint.
- 04 Who goes where Staff, contractors, concessionaires. Thousands of credentials, constant churn.
- 05 Work areas Plant, stores, back-of-house, and a fire strategy for a crowd.
- 06 Control room A real room, staffed continuously. Its entire measure is search and export.
Proof
The concern is not the terminal. It is the apron and the parking.
On a transport site, two things carry the risk and neither is where a visitor looks.
Paid parking, where the count of vehicles and the count of takings have to reconcile, and where an unmonitored bay becomes a place people use for things the operator does not want on the premises.
And fuelling: the bowsers, the route they take to refill, and the ground between. These are handled by teams who are very good at it, and the value of coverage there is not supervision. It is evidence: a record that what was done was done properly, on a night somebody asks.
Neither of those is a security problem until somebody needs to prove something.
Year seven
The estate grows and the system does not grow with it.
A new entrance opens. A concourse is extended. Concessions are added. Cameras are bought and added to the same recorder, which now holds less footage than it did last year, and nobody recalculated retention.
Nothing failed. Every addition was reasonable on its own. The retention has quietly halved and the first anybody hears of it is a request that reaches back further than you hold.
Find out how long your facility takes to answer a request.
We test every camera, verify retention against real recording rather than against configuration, and time a real search for a named window. A signed condition report, yours whatever you decide next.
The assessment is chargeable, quoted against the site, and adjusted in full against the first year if you take cover. Where cover is not taken, the fee covers our team’s time on site and the report we leave behind, and the report is yours either way.
Chargeable, and adjusted in full if you take cover.
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