1. How long has Immix® been used in the marketplace?
2. What is the track record of Immix® in terms of reliability?
3.How is such reliability obtained?
4. How scalable is Immix®?
5. How resistant is the Immix® system to hackers?
6. How secure can Immix® be to remote sites across the Internet?
7. How customizable is the Immix® software?
8. .How are upgrades and new releases of Immix® handled?
9. .What happens if I want to use equipment not currently supported by Immix®?
10. What level of security to the monitoring environment is available using Immix®?
11. What level of auditing does Immix® provide?
12. How does Immix® deal with the arming and disarming of sites?
13. How does Immix® deal with life safety or high priority events?
1. How long has Immix® been used in the marketplace?
The Immix® software has been in regular use since 2003. During this time the software has undergone many upgrades and new releases but the core product and core install has remained the same. The first user of Immix® regularly receives and handles over 4,000 incidents per night and has built their entire company around the performance and scalability of the Immix® product.
2. What is the track record of Immix® in terms of reliability?
Immix® is in constant use 24/7 in many monitoring environments on both sides of the Atlantic. The first customer started using the Immix® in 2003 and to date has never experienced a single outage. Since then the system has been released into many different monitoring environments throughout the US and Europe, as of yet, nobody has suffered an outage preventing them from continuing their monitoring duties.
3. How is such reliability obtained?
Immix® follows the very best programming practices using the market leading .NET-programming environment. Each component of Immix® is thoroughly tested to ensure its stability and performance prior to its release. All Immix® server processes are designed for installation on any number of contingency servers to ensure continuation of the service in the event of a hardware failure. Through the specification of Microsoft SQL Server for the database engine, Immix® can ensure reliability by using replication facilities offered by this enterprise software. The Immix® operator software has been designed to enable a very quick and easy switch over to contingency hardware to ensure monitoring agents can continue their work unaffected by hardware issues.
4. How scalable is Immix®?
The architecture of Immix® is such that there is no practical limit to the software in terms of size or volume. The system has been tested to over 10,000 unique alarms per second with a 100% alarm capture rate. There is no limit to the number of cameras, remote devices or quantity of sites that can be configured on the system and simultaneously monitored.
5. How resistant is the Immix® system to hackers?
Immix® has been designed to be compatible with many different types of quality hardware and software firewalls. In addition to the protection afforded by commercial firewalls, the software has its own in-built firewall whereby a connection attempt from a source not recognized as a belonging to a monitored site is automatically dropped without the software opening the packet. The software has been carefully designed to neutralize the buffer-overrun type of attacks often used. The multi-threaded services have shown themselves able to cope with the volumes of traffic needed to overcome other denial-of-service types of attack. Despite all this technical detail, perhaps the best assurance is provided by the fact that no Immix® customer has yet to be hacked despite a constant connection to the Internet for years at a time.
6. How secure can Immix® be to remote sites across the Internet?
Immix® supports many different levels of security for accessing remote devices through public networks. The first level of security is always the use of a username and password to gain access to the remote unit itself. This is fully supported through Immix® and encrypted authentication is supported when available by the device. The connection details are entered once into Immix® by the system administrator when setting up the site. The software will use this automatically without the monitoring agent ever knowing the security details.
For extra security, Immix® fully supports connections through VPN (Virtual Private Networks) across the Internet, or through dedicated leased lines. Immix® is also able to mix these network configurations within a single install which means that different sites can use different levels of security all within a single monitored environment. .
7. How customizable is the Immix® software?
Due to the very nature of the variety of uses for which the software has been designed, Immix® is highly customizable. There is an entire application dedicated to the setup and configuration of the system, and there are a myriad of options therein. For instance, entire new alarm types can be set up on the system and attributed to any connected device. Each alarm can be given its own priority level which enables a life-safety event, such as a fire alarm, to be afforded a faster operator response than an event such as motion from an outdoor camera. Every alarm can be associated with any number of camera or audio devices, even from completely different and disparate systems - which means that the operator will always get a complete picture of events occurring onsite without delay. There is also an enormous selection of system-wide preferences, such as the duration for which alarm and patrol image information is to be preserved, how long to keep monitoring statistics and the ability to change alarm and patrol outcomes.
8. How are upgrades and new releases of Immix® handled?
The Immix® platform is constantly undergoing development in order to ensure that it supports the best mix of quality on site hardware and to ensure it continues to be the best software of its type on the market. Each upgrade is released through a downloadable install package either through our website or on CD if requested. The Immix® upgrade process will always upgrade the software in-situ, leaving the system as a whole operating normally. The database information is always preserved throughout the upgrade and no data related to the monitoring environment or the audit trail is ever lost or overwritten during the upgrade.
9. What happens if I want to use equipment not currently supported by Immix®?
SureView Systems has partnered with many of the major security device manufacturers in order to ensure that device support is added to the system as quickly as possible once it is released. We are constantly adding support for new equipment and would be delighted to speak to you to discuss your individual requirements. Please contact us for available options.
10. What level of security to the monitoring environment is available using Immix®?
Security is at the very heart of the architecture of Immix®. Monitoring agents must authenticate themselves on the system using their own username and password. Once authenticated, each user is only provided with the functions within Immix® relevant to their job. For example, a junior operator is not given the option of arming or disarming sites or devices.
Authentication to the customer web portal is provided using a highly secure multi-layer system whereby they are asked for a username, password and random characters from a second password. This is the same procedure as used by the finance industry for on-line banking and is considered the safest non-hardware dependant authentication system. During login, the user is also told the last time they successfully accessed the system, thereby ensuring that compromised accounts are caught quickly.
11. What level of auditing does Immix® provide?
As Immix® is a server based database system, the detail of the audit trail is outstanding. Every alarm, every camera image viewed, and every use of two-way audio or door control is stored in the database. Each time a change is made to the site, the change is logged along with who made the change and from which PC. In short, there is nothing that can happen through the Immix® system that will not be automatically logged into the system and a record created of when it took place and who was involved.
12. How does Immix® deal with the arming and disarming of sites?
As it is usual for sites to require monitoring only during certain hours of the day, Immix® automatically takes care of the arming and disarming of sites. During each site setup, the monitoring hours of the site are entered into the Immix® system. A different schedule can be entered for each day of the week and a special schedule is also available for holidays. There can be as many arm/disarm cycles as needed during each 24-hour period.
If the site is to be armed or disarmed outside the scheduled period, the operators are able to perform this action manually through the Immix® front end software provided their authentication level allows this. When manually disarming a site, the operator must give a reason. As with everything else in the system, a log entry is made recording this event into the audit trail.
Immix® also enables users with sufficient rights to disarm individual detectors on site, either indefinitely or for a fixed period of time. This is a good way of dealing with localized activity on site (such as a gardener or a late worker) while making sure that the rest of the site is secure. Again, a reason for disarming the detector(s) must always be given by the operator and an entry into the audit trail is created.
13. How does Immix® deal with life safety or high priority events?
When a high priority event is received by the system, a number of actions are automatically performed to ensure that the operators deal it with as quickly as possible. Firstly, the alert will be received to the Immix® system even if the site is in a disarmed state. This is important as it enables fire and panic alarm type events to be acted upon even if the site is not being monitored for intruders or other such activity.
As usual, the moment the alarm has been received by Immix® it is presented to the operator. However, as the alarm queue is listed by priority order, not just by time received, the incident is automatically promoted to the top of the alarm queue. A high priority event can also be displayed as a different color to normal alarms and also can be set to give a different audio alert to ensure the agents are aware of it needing special attention.
All monitoring agents who are using the system while dealing with other events will notice their screens flash red and a message will appear at the top of the screen alerting them to the high priority alarm. This is in order to overcome the possibility of no free agents being available to deal with the high priority incident immediately and is designed to encourage someone to finish whatever they are doing and take control of this important alarm.
