Parramatta's Path to Safety and Success 

After a thorough review, the City of Parramatta decided to embrace a centralized Protege GX platform for their access control and alarm management. It also integrates with existing systems to provide the comprehensive security solution at scale that the council needed.

“As well as doing everything we need right now, like handle access and alarms across all locations” explains Al Salemi, “when we look at our future security systems strategy, it has all the integrations and lets us expand as required.”

“Our core operation, everything we have integrates with Protege GX, that is our foundation. We integrate all of the fire alarms into the system. And in case of emergency, we're able to lock down our whole building with one click of a button. All of this feeds back into our Security Operations Center, and can be actioned or activated by them using Protege.”

A key pillar to keep cities like Parramatta safe, is maintaining a 24/7 Security Operations Center to manage and quickly respond to incidents when they arise.

“We do everything in house so we don't outsource any security operations here at the council,” says Al Salemi. This means they’re looking to take advantage of any features to assist their in-house team.

“As we have over 110 sites, we can’t expect all our control room operators to have first-hand knowledge everywhere. So we have visual floor plans on the Protege GX dashboard to help them to understand the layout of all the facilities.”

“The operators get a pop-up telling them what has gone wrong and where. They will bring up the status and monitoring pages and have a look on the floor plan and when required they'll also pull up the video feed.”

Providing operators with detailed floor plans and alarm pop-ups, and supplementing these with live CCTV feeds, allows for immediate incident response. These actions help Parramatta to stay secure and means residents can feel safe on city streets.

Environmental factors were a consideration too, so that amenities like lighting and air conditioning would only be active during booked times. This meant integrating various subsystems like lighting, HVAC, hot water, and more to enhance useability and increase energy efficiency in facilities.

Al Salemi explains how easy the process is for hirers, “As soon as you enter a valid credential, the doors open, the lights, air-con, and all other systems such as hot water and AV turn on.”

“We've programmed things in the back end, such as allowing 15 minutes leeway on either end of the booking just to allow people to bump in or out of their events. And of course the alarms automatically arm at the end too. All of this integrates into Protege GX and is directly triggered from there.”