Coventry University will enhance security across its 33-acre city-centre campus with a surveillance upgrade that will unlock new capabilities and efficiency gains to support its dedicated security team. The university is upgrading to the latest version of Synectics’ Synergy software to benefit from features including enhanced video management, dynamic mapping, and integration to analytics-enabled cameras as part of its ongoing mission to keep students, staff, and visitors safe. The upgrade will allow a small team based out of the university’s central control room to monitor more efficiently and effectively over 1,300 cameras spread across a vast array of campus buildings, car parks, student areas and external sites, including halls of residence.
While several of these locations feature localised surveillance recording and viewing facilities, including some third-party technology, Synectics’ Synergy will integrate all feeds to ensure the central team has continuous command and control of cameras and recorded footage. As an additional layer of system resilience, a dedicated failover server is also being deployed as part of the upgrade. Synergy automatically identifies the best location to ‘backup’ video footage, allowing for seamless viewing and playback should the primary server be compromised. Integration with video analytics-enabled cameras, and the university’s dedicated alarm system, means that the central team will be alerted by Synergy to any suspicious behaviour that warrants immediate attention. This includes the presence and movement of cars or people in or around university premises at unusual times, or in areas with prohibited access, which is particularly beneficial for securing facilities that would be unmanned or patrolled infrequently. When an event that needs ‘eyes on’ is detected, footage from the nearest available cameras is prioritised in the control room. The exact location is pinpointed within Synergy’s mapping functionality for rapid response. An ‘incident’ is automatically created on the system – with footage pushed to and stored in a secure incident locker for evidential purposes.
This ensures the university is equipped to pursue internal security investigations and support local law enforcement as required.
Details of all operator activity, alarms received, and incidents generated are automatically logged on the system for fully transparent audit trails. Together with built-in data analysis and reporting wizards, this means the surveillance team can create valuable reports on incident types, frequency, trends, activity hot spots, how scenarios are dealt with, and a wide range of other information – all of which can be used to demonstrate best-practice compliance for public space surveillance and inform decisions about future security requirements. For Coventry University, the upgrade is a natural evolution of a 15-years-plus collaboration with Synectics. Gary Dedden, Head of Protection Services at Coventry University says: “It’s reassuring to work with the Synectics team, who we already know and trust, and benefit from a surveillance software platform we already find easy and intuitive to use.
“Alongside protecting everyone on site, effective use of resources is a key priority for us. We are always looking for ways to improve our ability to detect suspicious persons and activities across a very diverse campus without creating additional pressure for my team in the control room or for security personnel on the ground. “Upgrading to the latest version of Synergy allows us to do exactly that. It also unlocks future potential by giving us the flexibility to integrate with any emerging security technologies that we feel will further enhance our capabilities.”
