If you’ve ever visited the Ministry of Defence (MoD) building in Whitehall you’ll know it’s not somewhere just anyone can stroll into. You’re never left alone, not even in an empty meeting room, and you’re required to have your bag searched and to pass through a physical scanner. The average office or business premises doesn’t need to go to those lengths to maintain security, but we can take some tips from the MoD and add some of our own to help keep every business premises safe.
For businesses dealing with sensitive information, hazardous materials, or valuable items, visitor registration is a must. Anyone coming to the premises should have an appointment and potentially be background checked before the appointment is confirmed. This goes for suppliers too – ensure any suppliers provide information about their delivery staff ahead of any site visits.
Maintaining records of registered visitors, visit times, frequency, and duration is also good practice, not least from a fire safety point of view (knowing how many people are on site, and who they are) but from a security point of view. Patterns in visits may be linked to patterns in loss or may reveal a pattern leading up to a large incident. Good oversight and analysis of this data can help identify potential incidents before they happen.
Access control systems are obviously a vital element of managing visitors to your premises – if people need swipe cards, RFID fobs or even their fingerprint or retinal scan to be registered in order to access any areas, then you’ve already got a strong barrier against unauthorised access. It’s possible for key cards and fobs to be stolen from a staff member or taken by force, so consider whether biometric access control systems are more appropriate for your level of risk.
CCTV provides your eye in the sky across all areas of the business premises which can be monitored in real time on-site, by dedicated security guards, or off-site at our 24/7 monitoring centre. Unauthorised or unusual access patterns could be defined to alert monitoring staff of the precise cameras to be watching if an incident is happening; this is where AI can be a help to humans.
Alongside all of this is your escort policy. Places at high risk, like MoD premises, will insist on a personal escort at all times and this is good practice for such a sensitive premises. This may be appropriate for some or all parts of your business premises, depending on your risk level, the protection afforded by access control, and the relationship with each visitor. Frequent and trusted visitors may be safely left alone, while new visitors pose a higher risk.
Identification of visitors among staff is important too – a different coloured lanyard or badge background is useful for identifying visitors at a glance and on large premises this can be very helpful. Staff at a premise with a large workforce and many shift patterns may not recognise staff from visitors at a glance, so by marking visitors clearly you can ensure regular staff don’t inadvertently permit them access to sensitive areas.
At P&R Alarms we can provide access control and CCTV systems with monitoring to help you create a robust visitor management policy. In fact, you may already have the technology in place but not be using it, to its full potential. You may be on the fence about access control, and this is the nudge you need to go ahead and reap the security benefits of such a system. We can integrate these systems into existing intruder alarm systems or add features to existing systems. We can even design a complete overhaul on out-dated technology to get your visitor security policy and general security protocols right up to date, so get in touch today.