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• What is the Partnership for Priority Verified Alarm Response (PPVAR)?

  Intrusion alarms offer crime prevention and emergency notification in the event of a break in, but they are also a source of nuisance alarms.  Have nuisance alarms caused police officers to become complacent?  Years ago, I was a police officer in a major metropolitan city.  My district alone (1 of 12) received over 40 alarms in an 8 hour shift, every day.  Triple that number if a thunderstorm came through the city.  Not one officer ran emergency traffic to an intrusion alarm, unless there was a call from the homeowner in despair, a 911 hang-up, or some other verification confirmed the need.  Alarm calls would sit in queue for at least 15 minutes and then officers had 45 minutes to arrive onsite.

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• Growing as an Alarm Technician

  From entry level to consummate professional, how does someone become an alarm technician?  As many of us have found, the good alarm technician (both fire and intrusion) is a highly sought after asset that can make the difference for a company and their clients.  For the technician entering the field, there are some up-front decisions that need to be made.
  Alarm Installer or Alarm Technician?
  First, a question; what is the difference between an alarm installer and an alarm technician?
  Answer: 
  The alarm installer sees a problem, takes the defective product down, and puts a new product up, without finding out why the defective product became defective.  They take that defective product down and replace it with a non-defective item until the problem is solved or they run out of non-defective products. The alarm technician finds the defective product and before installing a new product, problem-solves the defective product.  They fix the issue, and then they install the new product. The following steps are a process to becoming an alarm technician for a company in the security or fire alarm industry.

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• The Benefits of Cameras for Public Safety

  Today there are cameras in many residences, almost every business, in a multitude of cities, and now even on some human bodies.  The camera serves as the eye to the world when physical eyes cannot be present.  The camera doesn’t sleep.  The camera is a reactive piece of technology consisting of a lens, a processor, and an image sensor, and a way to output the captured image.  The camera was designed initially to take an input and save that data to a storage device for review and / or to view real-time by a staff of operators who could then direct a response.

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• The Cloud Has Changed Everything…Even Security

  What does Microsoft Office365, Dropbox, Apple iCloud, and the future of electronic security systems have in common?  Two simple words… “The Cloud”.  What is the cloud?  The answer to this question has eluded many, because there is no one simple answer.  Talk to 10 different cloud providers, and you will get 10 different answers.  It is not a puffy white thing in the sky where are dreams are held.  The Cloud is a simply someone else’s data center.  The cloud is someone else’s problem.  It can be configured to hold different forms of digital media and data virtually.  The data can be held in silos or combined.  Storage and data can be added very quickly and extremely cost effective.  80% of the cloud is held by five companies, with Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) holding the majority.  

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