A good CCTV system should be used to deter prospective burglars. Used alone it cannot be relied upon to keep professional criminals away, but when used as part of a planned security operation it can prove quite effective.

Where should you be positioning your cameras in order to make them most effective?

Entrance and Exits

It’s important to keep entry and exit areas supervised for two reasons. Firstly, you can keep an eye over who is entering and exiting your building during working hours. Secondly, burglars target entrances that will give the least resistance. Thieves will more likely target a back door with only one lock than a front door with three. It is best therefore to keep this back door under surveillance.

Places of value

You must keep the valuable belongings of your employees, clients and the business in general under watch. Should a crime occur, you must be able to provide CCTV footage in order to help the police and hopefully ensure a prosecution.

You must keep your car parks in mind when designing a CCTV system. Car-park cameras should be positioned at a lower height in order to catch license plates and other details. For this reason, it might be a good idea to protect your cameras against vandalism, as they are at extra risk. CCTV cameras are usually kept at least three metres off the ground in order to prevent intentional damage, but they can also be protected by cages and other shielding devices.

Optimise your gaze

It is highly recommended that you run your floor plans through some optimised software beforehand. Take, by way of example, this piece of software from JSVG which allows you to project the locations in which you can detect and identify intruders. You can plan your cameras out before you position them in order to maximise the surveilled area.

It’s a good idea to position your cameras to allow an overlap between footage. This means that you can follow any individual between cameras and hopefully keep track of them easier.

Lastly, remember to keep your CCTV systems operational. Is there any point to having a CCTV camera if it wasn’t recording during a criminal incident? By regularly keeping an eye on your CCTV’s operations, you can ensure that it doesn’t go down at important times.