Siemens leverages its central stations

BUFFALO GROVE, Ill.—Siemens has launched a new service that delivers consistent security enforcement and lower costs through security-as-a-service- (SaaS) enabled remote security management (RSM), offering commercial end users greater control and more functionality.

According to Phil Atteberry, Siemens' director of Managed Security Services, the service changes how Siemens adds value to commercial end users. “The ASP—the application service provider—is what a typical security system would be with the server onsite and managed by the end user themselves. How [SaaS-enabled RSM] is better is that the customer gets the full functionality that a normal system would get, but we provide it through a software-as-a-service web portal,” Atteberry said. “All the servers and maintenance and upgrades are all done through our center in Dallas. So for a customer who doesn't have the budget or the in-house expertise to administer, manage or monitor a system, this becomes a very viable solution.”

With RSM, Siemens administers, manages, and monitors access control and video systems 24x7x365. By accessing a secure, interactive hosted web portal, end users have full transparency to their systems and events anytime, anywhere. Access control monitoring and management includes new and existing services such as a hosted server, system administration, alarm/event monitoring and management, connection monitoring and management, management web portal, reporting tools, and an ID-badging service.

“Customers get the same service they've been getting for years from our central station, but now it's delivered in an easier mechanism for them to actually do the service themselves and actually work with the system,” Atteberry said. “Say for instance there was a door forced open, we're able to not only respond through access control, but to instantly get feed from the video system, providing us pre-alarm footage. We can investigate further by directly linking up with the video system. When customer wants to view what they happened they can go on their own portal and generate a report that not only shows the actions that were taken and the resolution, but also a direct link to the video of what happened during out investigation. So it provides complete remote security management of that event.”