Installing CCTV is an important step towards protecting your business — but simply having cameras on the wall doesn't necessarily mean your property is properly protected.
At Fortify Security Systems, we regularly work with existing CCTV installations across Gibraltar. One of the things we often find is that a system can appear to be working perfectly well from the outside, while problems are quietly developing behind the scenes.
A camera may be displaying a live image but not recording. A hard drive could be failing. Night-time footage may be practically unusable. The system clock could be wrong. Remote access may still be available to people who should no longer have it.
Unfortunately, many of these problems aren't discovered until after an incident has occurred and someone tries to retrieve the footage. Here are 10 things we believe every business owner should periodically check.
1. Are All Your Cameras Actually Recording?
This sounds obvious, but there's an important difference between seeing a live camera image and having that footage successfully recorded. Don't simply open your CCTV app and check that the cameras are online. Go into playback and try retrieving footage from yesterday, last week and, if your retention period allows it, further back. Check every camera individually. If an incident happened tonight, you need confidence that the footage would actually be there tomorrow morning.
2. How Much Recorded Footage Do You Actually Have?
How many days of CCTV footage can your system retain? The answer depends on several factors, including:
- Number of cameras
- Camera resolution
- Recording quality
- Frame rate
- Recording schedule
- Video compression
- Hard-drive capacity
- Continuous versus event-based recording
Adding cameras or increasing their resolution without considering storage can significantly reduce the amount of historical footage available. A system that once stored several weeks of recordings may now only retain a few days. It's worth knowing the answer before you need footage from two weeks ago.
3. Is Your CCTV Hard Drive Healthy?
The hard drive inside your NVR or DVR is one of the most important components of the entire CCTV system. It's also something most people never see. CCTV hard drives operate continuously, writing enormous amounts of data throughout their working lives. Like any storage device, they can eventually develop faults or fail. A failed camera is normally obvious. A recording problem can be much easier to miss. Regular maintenance should therefore include checking the health and operation of the system's storage.
4. Are Your Cameras Still Pointing in the Right Direction?
Camera positioning isn't necessarily permanent. Cameras can move slightly over time. Building work can change the environment. Signs, plants, furniture or other objects can obstruct views. Sometimes we've seen perfectly operational cameras providing excellent footage of an area that is no longer particularly useful. Look at each camera from a security perspective. What exactly is this camera protecting? Can you clearly see entrances? Are important areas covered? Could you identify someone from the footage? Are there obvious blind spots? Good CCTV isn't about having the greatest possible number of cameras. It's about having the right coverage in the right locations.
5. What Does Your CCTV Look Like at Night?
A camera that produces an excellent image at 2pm might perform very differently at 2am. Night-time performance is particularly important for businesses because that's often when premises are unattended. Check your cameras after dark. Look for issues such as:
- Overexposed areas
- Excessive darkness
- Reflections from walls or windows
- Infrared glare
- External lighting affecting the image
- Motion blur
- Poor identification at entrances
Don't assume that because the daytime picture looks good, the night-time footage will be equally useful.
6. Is the Date and Time Correct?
This is a small detail that can become extremely important. If CCTV footage is required following an incident, an incorrect timestamp can make locating and interpreting recordings considerably more difficult. It can also create confusion when footage needs to be provided to the police, insurers or another third party. Check the time displayed by your CCTV system against the actual time. And remember that systems may also need to correctly account for seasonal clock changes.
7. Who Currently Has Remote Access?
This is particularly important for businesses. Over the years, remote CCTV access might have been given to:
- Owners
- Managers
- Employees
- Contractors
- Previous security installers
- IT providers
- Former members of staff
When someone leaves the organisation, is their access removed? If you've taken over a business with CCTV already installed, do you know who configured the system originally? Do you know whether the previous owner can still access it? CCTV security isn't only about protecting cameras from physical interference. Access to the system itself needs to be properly controlled. Review users periodically and remove access that is no longer required.
8. Are You Receiving Useful Alerts — or Just Hundreds of Notifications?
Modern CCTV systems can do far more than simply record video. Depending on the equipment, smart detection can differentiate between people, vehicles and other movement and provide useful notifications when activity occurs in specific areas. But badly configured alerts can quickly become useless. If your phone receives dozens of notifications every time a tree moves, an animal walks past or headlights cross the camera, you're eventually going to stop looking at them. Smart detection needs to be configured around the property and the customer's requirements. A smaller number of meaningful alerts is far more useful than hundreds of unnecessary ones.
9. When Was Your CCTV System Last Maintained?
CCTV isn't a fit-and-forget technology. Cameras are exposed to Gibraltar's sun, wind, rain, dust and salty coastal environment. Lenses become dirty. Cameras move. Hard drives age. Network configurations change. Power supplies deteriorate. Firmware becomes outdated. Vegetation grows into camera views. Regular maintenance allows these problems to be identified before they affect the system when you actually need it.
At Fortify, we offer ongoing CCTV maintenance and support for residential and commercial systems, including suitable installations originally fitted by other providers.
10. Could You Retrieve Footage Quickly During an Incident?
Imagine something happened at your business last night. Could you confidently: Find the correct camera? Locate the relevant time? Play back the footage? Export the recording? Provide it to the police if required? If the answer is "I'm not sure", it's worth learning how your system works before you're dealing with the pressure of an actual incident. A professionally installed CCTV system should not only record useful footage — the people responsible for the system should understand how to access it.
Bonus Check: What Happens if the Recorder Is Stolen?
There's another question increasingly worth considering. Your cameras may be mounted securely around the property, but where is the recorder? If somebody entering the premises can easily locate and remove the NVR or DVR, potentially they could remove the footage along with it. This is one of the reasons we're increasingly discussing cloud CCTV and off-site recording with businesses. Fortify has partnered with VideoLoft to provide cloud CCTV options that can add an additional off-site layer to compatible security installations. For some businesses, the best solution may be traditional local recording. For others, cloud recording may make sense. And in certain environments, a combination of both can provide additional resilience.
CCTV Should Be Tested Before You Need It
The worst time to discover a problem with your CCTV system is immediately after an incident. Yet that's exactly when many businesses discover that a camera wasn't recording, the hard drive had failed or the footage they expected simply isn't there. Taking a few minutes periodically to check your CCTV system can make a significant difference. Better still, have it professionally inspected and maintained.
Already Have CCTV? Fortify Can Check It
You don't need to have purchased your original CCTV system from Fortify. If you already have CCTV installed at your Gibraltar business, we can assess the existing installation and determine whether we can maintain, repair, upgrade or take over the system. Where the existing equipment is perfectly serviceable, we'll work with what you already have rather than recommending replacement simply for the sake of it. And where we identify something that needs attention, we'll explain the issue and the available options.
Book a Fortify Security Health Check
If you're unsure when your CCTV system was last properly checked, our Security Health Check is a good place to start. We can review your existing security setup, identify potential weaknesses and help you understand whether your current system is providing the protection you think it is. Because having cameras installed is one thing.