24hr Guard of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia

«I am pleased to say that we have been able to provide equipment which can be regarded as the best in its class and is able to exactly match the Bank’s demanding requirements.»

— Richard Slee, Director of Security Systems Design Limited

♦ Challenge

Following a refurbishment of its offices on the third floor of Senator House in Queen Victoria Street, EC4, the Bank asked Richard Slee, a Director of Security Systems Design Limited, to design a CCTV system which could assist security personnel to provide a high level of protection for staff as well as the Bank’s assets. “Senator House is a multi-tenanted office building and although no cash is handled on the premises, the Bank nevertheless needs to maintain strict control over visitors, welcome or otherwise,” said Richard Slee. “The objective therefore was to install a CCTV system to work alongside an existing access control system.”

♦ Solution

Security Systems Design Limited installed nine Hanwha SIR-60 Day/Night dome cameras with built-in LEDs. The SIR-60 can capture very high quality color images at 580TV lines resolution during the day. At night or in any environment where there may be zero light, the camera’s built-in LEDs are activated and provide effective lighting up to a distance of seven meters. At the same time, the camera switches to monochrome mode generating superb monochrome images at 700TV lines resolution. The brightness of the LEDs is automatically adjusted to take into account how far away an object or person is from the camera. Images from the nine cameras are recorded simultaneously onto a Hanwha SVR-945 DVR which uses a highly efficient MPEG-4 compression method to ensure that the three terabytes of on-board video storage capacity is more than enough to record all activity throughout the Bank’s offices. The SVR-945 is located in the Bank’s secure comms room.

♦ Result

Security Systems Design Limited has successfully completed the installation of a Hanwha CCTV system at the London offices of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. Richard worked closely with the Bank’s Facilities Manager to draw up the specification for the system which included a requirement that all cameras should have day/night capabilities, as well as built-in lighting so that high quality color images could be captured during the day and equally good monochrome images in night time conditions. “We considered cameras as well as digital recording equipment from a number of manufacturers. We came to the conclusion that we could source all that was required from Hanwha who were able to demonstrate confidence in the reliability of their equipment by offering a full three year warranty,” added Richard Slee. “The other important factor that helped us make the decision to use Hanwha equipment was that its DVRs are supplied with license-free CMS (Centralized Management Software) which makes it very easy for the Facilities Manager to monitor the CCTV system from a PC on his desk,” and said “In the current economic climate, the client was understandably looking for a solution which would not put undue strain on the budget available for security equipment,” added Richard Slee. “I am pleased to say that we have been able to provide equipment which can be regarded as the best in its class and is able to exactly match the Bank’s demanding requirements.”