Universities

Universities have been compared to small towns because of their many buildings and their large student populations and because they regulate themselves to a large extent. Supporting academic learning and research requires considerable investment in IT facilities so the universities have large IT departments to provide the computing power and the data networks for a wide range of demands from the faculties and departments.

In each campus there are security issues to be managed and various equipment is deployed to ensure that the university’s students and staff are safe, that the buildings are protected and that incidents can quickly be responded to by the in-house security team. The IT network provides a terrific communications resource to connect all the various security systems and provide rapid and detailed information.

So Terrier SC’s IP Alarm Signalling system is a good choice on several levels. Firstly, as universities move from analogue telephone systems to IP telephones, the older type of dial-up communicators found in alarm systems have to be replaced. As data networks reach almost every campus building, it is relatively simple for the communicator in the alarm system to be swapped out. The second reason why the Terrier SC system is favoured is because the point of concentration of the alarms is a server and that server can reside within the university’s own data centre(s). This allows the university IT department to ensure that their external firewalls are intact, that the servers themselves are reliable, that they are provided with the appropriate level of redundancy and they do not pose a risk to other resources.

Universities put our communicators to a wide variety of uses. As well as monitoring fire alarms in various types of buildings, they have intruder alarms and a range of more industrial type monitoring largely geared to experimental work. This can be fridges or constant temperature equipment maintaining where a change of temperature could damage an experiment and a speedy response required to rectify the problem. The emergency telephone function is deployed into lifts on campus so a problem with a passenger lift is quickly identified and the security team can reassure the lift occupants and summon help. The emergency telephone function is also available for refuge areas.

Having the responsibility of care for a large number of people on their campus, universities manage their own services and facilities. An alarm signalling system that works within their IT network and can be monitored using their standard processes and offering a wide functionality. If you would like to know more about what Terrier can do for your university, please contact us.