Sector
Corporate & technology
Four offices, four contractors, four different systems, and one head of administration expected to answer for all of them. We design and maintain security across corporate offices and technology campuses in Mumbai. Specified so that a question asked at head office can be answered without visiting the site.
Corporate security is judged twice: once by your own management, and once by the customer whose audit you have to pass. The second is the harder test, and it is usually the one nobody designed for.
What actually goes wrong
Nothing dramatic. The same six things, in every office we walk into.
| What fails | Why it fails | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Leavers still have working cards | Exit is an HR process and access is an admin one, and nothing joins them. | The person with the most reason to be unhappy has the access they had on their last day. |
| Laptops go from desks at lunch | Open floors, meeting rooms and the café near the entrance are covered for the room, not for the desk. | A laptop is gone. The camera saw the room. It did not see who picked it up. |
| Visitors sign a paper register at the desk | It has always been done that way and nobody has been asked for it. | Somebody who said he was from the AC company was here for two hours. There is a name in a book and no photograph. |
| Everybody is in one access group | Zoning was deferred at fit-out and never revisited. | The system records who went where and it means nothing, because everybody could go everywhere. |
| The server room is on the same access level as the floor | It is a room on the floor plan, so it was treated as one. | The most sensitive room in the office has the same protection as the pantry. |
| The reception camera has been down for months | It is the one camera nobody checks, because somebody is always sitting there. | Every visitor and every delivery passes the one position that sees nothing. |
The one that happens quietly
Somebody resigns on Monday. What can they still reach on Friday?
In this country an employee leaving to start something of his own is not unusual. It is how half the firms in your industry began, including possibly yours. Most people do it honestly. Some take a client list, a drawing set, or a folder off a shared drive on the way out, and by the time anybody notices, they are quoting against you.
The card is still live because leaving is HR's process and access is admin's, and in almost every office we assess nothing connects the two. The floor, the records room, the server room: all still open to them.
You will not find this in the system, because nothing about it looks wrong. You will find it in an audit, when somebody counts the valid credentials against the payroll. Or you will find it the other way, in a tender you lose to somebody who used to work for you.
Check who still has access to my officesWhat we carry here
- Access control
- Floors, server rooms, records and executive areas as separate zones
- Joining, moving and leaving connected to the access system, so a credential dies with the role
- Every temporary and contractor pass carries an expiry when it is issued
- Surveillance
- Reception, lifts, floor entries, server room approach and the loading bay
- One retention standard across every office, not one per landlord
- Health monitored centrally, so a failure is known before it is needed
- Networking
- Corporate, guest and building systems separated
- Meeting-room and visitor access that identifies a person
- Logs retained and held where somebody can answer for them
- Fire & life safety
- Detection and evacuation across a leased floor, coordinated with the landlord's base build
- Interlocks that actually release the doors and recall the lifts
- Test records you hold, rather than ones the building manager says exist
Building management is usually the landlord's. AV is specified for boardrooms and town halls where required.
The same six stages
A leased office starts at stage two, and that is the problem.
- 01 Outside the gate Usually the landlord's, which means it is not yours to design and not yours to fix. Worth knowing what it does before you rely on it.
- 02 Entry The building lobby is the landlord's. Your floor entry is yours. Most incidents happen in the gap between the two.
- 03 Inside the building Floor plates, lifts, fire stairs, and the route to the server room. Short distances, so gaps here are unforgivable.
- 04 Who goes where The whole sector in one stage. Zoning, joiners and leavers, contractors, and the record an audit will ask for.
- 05 Work areas Server rooms, records, and a fire strategy coordinated with a base build somebody else designed.
- 06 Control room Usually a desk at reception. The measure is whether head office can see all four sites from one place.
Proof
The room has everything in it. Nobody uses any of it.
A corporate office where the boardroom was specified properly: good screens, good sound, everything that was asked for. And it is not used, because nobody can make it work in the two minutes before a meeting starts.
So the room gets booked and somebody brings a laptop and an HDMI cable, and the system sits there. The one time it absolutely cannot fail is when somebody senior is in the room, which is exactly why nobody will risk it.
Underneath that, two quieter things. Access levels that were never zoned, so everybody opens every door and the log proves nothing. And storage growing every year, because retention was set once and nobody has asked since whether it is still what the business needs.
Technology is supposed to make a building easier to run. A system people are afraid of has failed, whatever the commissioning sheet says.
Year seven
An office estate does not fail. It fragments, one lease at a time.
You take a new floor and the landlord's contractor fits it. You expand and a different vendor does the extension. A site changes hands and the incoming IT head brings his own supplier.
Nothing has gone wrong at any single office. But there is no longer one system, one standard or one number to call, and nobody made that decision. It happened one lease at a time over six years, and the person who has to answer for it is the one who joined last year.
Also on this
Find out who still has access to your offices.
We test every camera, reader and door across the offices you nominate, count the valid credentials against your current headcount, and give you a signed condition report per site.
The assessment is chargeable, quoted against the site, and adjusted in full against the first year if you take cover. Where cover is not taken, the fee covers our team’s time on site and the report we leave behind, and the report is yours either way.
Chargeable, and adjusted in full if you take cover.
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