News
Cisco Unveils Safety and Security Solutions for Intelligent Risk Mitigation
April 2011 by Marc Jacob
ISC West — As part of the Cisco Smart+Connected Communities initiative, Cisco announced a series of safety and security product innovations powered by a comprehensive medianet architecture to help cities, enterprises, small businesses and partners transform the way they protect people, property and critical infrastructure. Safety and security are pillars of Cisco’s Smart+Connected Communities strategy for supporting regional transformation at the economic, social and environmental levels.
Today’s announcement introduces enhancements to several Cisco services designed to help customers transition to IP-based safety and security systems.
These include:
Updates to the Cisco Physical Access Manager, Cisco’s application for managing integrated security operations on an IP network. Cisco Physical Access Manager integrates hardware such as door readers, locks and biometric devices on campus environments and office buildings, providing a platform for integration with other IT systems.
Enhancements to the Cisco IP Interoperability and Collaboration System (IPICS), Cisco’s complete IP-based dispatch and incident response solution.
A comprehensive Network Readiness Assessment service for IP Video Surveillance that will help Cisco channel partners to evaluate and better plan their customers’ network capabilities to support standard and high-definition video surveillance solutions.
The new solutions will help meet increasing demands of public and private sector organizations to efficiently and effectively support threat mitigation, crisis collaboration and situational awareness.
The integrated safety and security solution not only offers advanced video surveillance capabilities but also takes advantage of integration with medianet network-based services to support optimal end-to-end video quality while automating many aspects of configuration and deployment.
By delivering server capabilities to the network edge and integrating device and alert alarms with IP-based dispatch and incidence response, these solutions help to address a growing range of threats and challenges that can impact supply chains and economies.
Cisco Physical Access Manager 1.3
Cisco Physical Access Manager now delivers enhanced local survivability for network-based access control by helping to ensure that if a system fails, access identity and operations still function effectively. For example, an improved fault tolerant anti-passback feature works even in the event of a network outage to help ensure that premises maintain a high degree of security under uncertain conditions.
The solution allows plug-and-play medianet-enabled cameras to be used as motion-detection sensors. This enables customers to consolidate alarm management procedures, thereby lowering the cost of security operations.
Government and enterprise customers can reduce the fraudulent duplication of access cards and identity credentials through support for new federal identity standards such as FIPS-201 and HSPD-12.
For global customers, the Cisco Physical Access Manager 1.3 desktop client provides the ability to display menus and other text in multiple languages.
Cisco IP Interoperability and Communications System (IPICS)
Cisco IPICS is a complete IP-based dispatch and incidence-response solution enabling rapid, reliable communication using whatever desktop or mobile device is at hand to provide public safety personnel with continuous, real-time communication as well as streaming video.
Cisco demonstrated solutions on IPICS mobile platforms, including Android, with future support planned for the Cisco Cius(TM) tablet. IPICS now includes expanded operating system support for Windows 7, as well as for iOS 4 devices, including the iPhone 4 and iPad 2.
The latest generation of routers, including the Cisco Integrated Services Router G2 and router media service gateway, are now supported, as well as all types of radios and future mobile and broadband networks, including narrowband and 4G / Long-Term Evolution (LTE).
Cisco also today announced the Cisco IPICS Video Dispatch Starter Kit, a turn-key package that contains all the hardware and software necessary to transform the Cisco Video Surveillance system into a collaboration solution enabling dynamic real-time two-way video sharing between the operations center and mobile users.
Prior to video deployments, Cisco is helping customers remediate any network design or capacity issues by making training, knowledge and tools available today to Cisco Authorized Technology Provider (ATP) Partners to analyze, inventory and assess customer networks.
The goal in assessing the network is to ensure the quality of experience of the video surveillance deployment to meet the safety, security and loss-prevention needs of the business and organization.
To help customers simulate planned video traffic loads, Cisco also introduced Video Operation as part of its Cisco IP Service Level Agreement suite. This Cisco IOS(R) Software feature for the Cisco Catalyst(R) 3000 Series Switches enables video surveillance, Cisco TelePresence or IPTV traffic to be simulated using profiles prior to full deployment and to troubleshoot video performance in existing networks.
