There’s more to securing your premises than locking the door. You need to consider many other factors to ensure that you remain safe and protected.
Securing business premises used to be a simple matter. You locked the doors at night and perhaps employed a night watchman to patrol the premises. These days things are much more complex. You still need to protect the site outside working hours but you also need to ensure it’s safe from unauthorised access during the day.
Modern business premises are often on out of town sites where there are no passers by outside of working hours. This presents unique problems when it comes to providing security. You need to protect the building itself but also provide safety for any employees that are working late or arriving early. Rather than look at individual measures it’s important to take an integrated security approach and look at all of the following:
- Doors, gates and locks
- Lighting and sight lines
- Vehicle access
- Surveillance systems
- Access control
- Protecting employees
Let’s examine some of these in more detail.
Security Basics
Locks on doors and gates are where your security starts. If you have areas that need a higher degree of protection you might want to think about security doors that are more resistant to intrusion. Lighting is important too. Burglars will be deterred by premises that are well lit and offer no shadows where they can lurk unobserved. For this reason it’s also important to look carefully at the surroundings of the building. Are there bushes or other objects that may obstruct sight lines and provide cover for intruders?
You should think about vehicle access to the site too. Thieves rely on a car or van to carry away their spoils. So if you can make vehicle access more difficult out of hours you can help to deter theft.
Surveillance Measures
Ensuring that premises remain secure often revolves around surveillance. CCTV systems are now affordable and easy to install. They can also be remotely monitored from another site or a central control room. This removes the need to have on-site security personnel at all times but still ensures that your business is protected.
Camera surveillance not only protects the site when there’s no one there, it’s also an important contribution to safe working too for personnel who may need to be present outside normal working hours.
Access Control
In a smaller business access control may be as simple as designating a number of key holders. Where requirements are more complex it may be necessary to consider a greater level of sophistication. Access by swipe cards for example not only protects against intruders but can also log employee movements so that you can guard against pilfering and control access to sensitive information.
You can tailor a system to cover certain areas such as stores or computer rooms. Alternatively you can build a sophisticated system to cover the entire site so that you can keep track of who is allowed to go where.
There’s a lot to consider when protecting your premises but by looking at integrated security you’ll ensure maximum protection.
AUTHOR BIO
Bill Williams is a freelance writer specialising in security and surveillance systems. To find out more about integrating your security visit this page.