The Ultimate Guide to Self Storage Security with DSOC | Self Storage Explained

People with no clothes on. We've seen that. We've seen that.

Literally just at storage sites or.

Yeah, just wondered. Yeah, one in particular just wandered on. Absolutely nothing on at all. Walked on like he was. Walked on like he was just fine. You know, I'm just coming into this storage site and then check my unit out. It didn't present as unusual other than the fact it had absolutely zero clothes on.

Yeah. Because like that your AI wouldn't pick it up because not only without wearing a. There's actually nothing on at all.

Nothing on at all.

Yeah. Hello and welcome to our latest edition of the Self Storage Explained podcast. Today I am delighted to be joined by Ant. He. Welcome to the podcast. Where are you at the moment?

So I'm. I mean I am in desoc. I'm not in the control room, but yes, I mean, firstly, well done with the surname. I think that's the most well pronounced I've had on a podcast so far. Yeah. So we're in Doncaster. So D SOC is based in Doncaster, South Yorkshire in England.

Just for anybody who doesn't know what is, what is DSOC and what do you do?

Cool. So I'll start to say, well, thanks for having me on, obviously. And I know we've known each other for quite a while now. In this weird world of self storage, it's always nice to be able to share our experiences and kind of experience and expertise. So I'll start with dsoc. So D soc, full name, DSOC is Doncaster Security Operations center, which I always like to start with because I think that gives you a feel for what DSOC is. DSOC is this. That's behind me really. It's a control room based in Doncaster. We've got all the highest accreditations a control room can have and we have all the best trained individuals working in that control room. Myself, so my whole career experience is actually as a security systems engineer. So in the first 12, 13 years of my career I installed alarm systems, camera systems and then most recently at dsoc. My job's been growing this business promoting the brand of DSOC and the expert services that we provide. And the reason that we're on this is that we've specialized in the niche of self storage, providing remote monitoring to self storage facilities and.

Hello. So that role, that's the rule that you're doing at the moment, that takes you to all the shows and all the conferences where we tend to pass each other all the time. And even just at Fidesa, a couple of weeks ago you won the innovation award Beating some really stiff competition, including Stora to the award. Can you tell us about the product that won the Innovation Award? Because it's always interesting to hear what's kind of the new stuff that people are working on.

Yeah, thanks for that. I probably should have mentioned that, shouldn't I? You've done me a favor. Yeah, I'll be honest, genuinely this is not one of them things that people say whether like we were so surprised we, we won the UK Innovation Award earlier in the year as well. But when we saw the competition for the European award we genuinely were, when we won it, shocked. I mean we know how good the product is. The service and products that we put forward for that award is our suspicious activity AI. We'll probably get into what that is as you ask some more questions around it. But it's that blend of a technical service that we run on our alarm management platform and the way that we work with the systems that we link to and receive events from. But also it's that human piece of our human operators operating, receiving these alarms, handling the alarms and then deciding and going through an investigation to see what is suspicious and what is not. And quite a big impact in the UK and we're now starting to in Europe as we go into Europe.

Very nice. So yeah, be interesting to hear a bit more about that. But just moving on to kind of like your team and I'm interested in like what actually happens there. I know that I hope the background is a picture because that person's sitting very still. Our background picture. There's absolutely nobody in the office. But what is a tip typical day for someone in your team?

I can use this as an example. So behind me a guy called Rich, I called him Ricky, but to customers he's Rich. Rich is actually, he's a team leader on that shift so there'd be Rich and three of his operators are far on the team. And there's kind of two halves of how that function in the control room works over a 24 hour period. You've got the during office hours, during day hours, a lot of the customers sites that we monitor, the alarm systems are not armed or set and a lot of the camera systems are not sending us activations, a lot of them. So during the day it's more of a commissioning new sites running tests with engineers on sites running tests with store managers answering calls like a control room call center function, more of that type of function during the day hours. And then really we always say it comes alive. 4, 5pm onwards through to 5, 6 7am, when all of these sites are closed or staff have left them, site the sites, but the customers are still accessing the sites. And at that point this control room becomes very busy on the, what we call inbound activity, where the alarms and the cameras are sending a lot of events to us. And these guys work through them, handle them in the screens that you can see and make decisions around what to do about that.

So let's say something's going on on site, so you see something happening. I don't know, I'm going to ask you there all those things you've seen, but let's say something, something suspicious is going on. What are the different potential ways that your team can respond to that?

It's a great question. That's, that's the crux of the job really. Sometimes I think people think they don't think about it too much actually. What does it actually work like in practice? In most occasions it's a call to her key holder. In most occasions you're ringing a member of staff, a dedicated named someone who's responsible for that site to just confirm things, to just explain to them what it is that you've seen. It may be that an intruder alarm system's not being set correctly. So you're ringing them to say could you please go and reset the intruder alarm or at least to make you aware that it's not being set. And then everything from that which is your mundane usual alarms coming in, you ringing a key holder to you've seen something suspicious. And then we work on what we call a suspicion to belief scale, where if we've received a CCTV event, an access control event, an alarm event, and our human operator has now gone past that stage of this is not something little that doesn't need further investigation. This is something I believe to be suspicious. Whether that be the actual event and the systems created a suspicious event, or whether it's just the humans got that feeling from what they're looking at, then there's a series of things we can do. So one of the biggest tools we have for CCTV monitoring is the use of speakers. So we will quite often use a PA system or a speaker system on site to issue out live audio warnings or live audio instructions, because a lot of them triggers that we get from a self storage site could be actually be a customer. So quite a lot of the time it's to just talk to that customer, to say person who's just accessed to gain access to unit 206. Could you please go back to the keypad because we're not sure about the credential. Or it could be you're seeing something definitely suspicious. And the audio message is a completely different tone of leave, leave site immediately. And then we move on to what do we do about that? If we're in one of them scenarios of we've deemed it suspicious, we're now escalating. We can escalate to a private guard response, security guard response, or if we believe a crime to be in progress, we'd escalate straight to police. So sometimes in that whole chain of events, our operator can quickly go from being suspicious about something to believing it to be a crime. We're very clear with our instructions with the customers. Nobody should be on this site past this time, for example. And then anybody on that site past that time is trespassing on that site. So we could go straight to police in self storage. That's more difficult to achieve and that's why we've got lots of different products and services to be able to kind of provide that. But I think that captures what we would do about it. And then we would follow up with things such as reports and whatever that client needs to land on their desk by the morning and police crime numbers and such like.

What's, what's a, what's a police response generally to, you know, I know. Well, I don't know this for a fact, but I've heard that if there's a fire at a self storage facility, generally unless there's somebody in the building, the typical response is like, you know, there's no threat to life here. So we're not like we won't necessarily go in and do a whole lot.

I think that the life safety one, the fire and life safety alarm that you've just described, you're generally right. Depends upon how proactive the self storage operator is, the fire alarm system they have, how intuitive it is. Can the monitoring station confirm to the brigade that the fire's been initiated in certain area of the building? They've got to consider their own workers safety as well entering that building. So with the fire brigade you can get a lot of pushback for them to actually enter the building. Any kind of inkling that someone else is in the building, then they will do their best to do that. But there's a lot of measures you've got to achieve and I've heard that in the industry a lot recently. It's good to hear like the reaction that Paul Farhi had to the storage world. One is great to hear that's where this industry is fantastic. This sector, they have a disaster like that. They openly talk about it and everybody wants to be better from it. Yes. So that's, that's that one with fire and life safety. When it comes to police response I would say it would depend upon the message they've received from whoever it is that's letting them know there's a crime. If that's a good message of clear crime in action with some good instruction behind it and then they would obviously accept that it's a crime in progress and it falls within their normal instructions then they would attend as quick as they can get to that site with the intention to arrest whoever is on that site.

What's the most brazen act of theft you've ever seen on a self storage site?

Yeah, it's just the most obvious one we could imagine. No face covering? No, no. No way of disguising who they are walking during the day, bust a door open and steal what's inside it and walk out. That's. We've seen that now on some sites we actually don't get an event from that in. In a lot of cases if that's during the day because that's a star that's got a person inside it. We're not receiving events from all of the customers who enter in and out. So really brazen acts like that, they can at times get away with it. What you're relying on there is the fact you've got good solid evidence on them because they've been brazen enough to. The face is visible, you know who they are. Often they've already got a unit out for rent, you can chase it through and the police get them afterward. The most brazen out of hours is always the same M.O. it's always the same people. It's multiple people. Bali Clavaed up, coming in transit van ramming a gate, ramming a barrier, hitting multiple containers, multiple drive ups or multiple units. It happens. Unfortunately it's not. Well, I'm sure we'll get onto this as we talk but it's not as, it's not as common as I think I've heard people saying it but it still happens.

And these sort of. In that sort of situation, I mean are they looking, have they planned this? Have they got some containers they want to hit because they know there's something valuable in them or is it, is it generally just a random kind of thing like let's open a bunch and see if we find anything.

Usually when it's as quick as that and they're only busting two or three. And I know we're saying containers, but it could be the same for internal bars. Yeah, yeah, it's as fast as that. Fully covered up and they're only hitting 1, 2, 3, less than 5 units. That's usually targeted. That's usually some kind of information intelligence they've got. Whether that's because they've stored themselves on site under fake whatever and they've had a, a scope of the site and a scout of the site, or whether that's through small commercial business kind of swapping information amongst each other, or maybe someone posting on social media that they've got something valuable in a unit.

What are the core things, the main things you advise people, recommend people do to minimize the chance of theft at their site?

Cool. I mean, great question. Get remote monitoring. You've got to break it down a little bit more. And I'll try not to talk for 45 minutes on the subject, but depends upon the style, the type of storage in a lot of cases. So is it external storage as in containers or drive up units, is it internal facility storage or is it mix? And if we start with the container externals, it would always be the perimeter that I'd be talking about first. It would always be have. If you have a, if you have fencing now, always consider better fencing until you look at your fencing and go, that's as good as I'm ever going to afford and justify having, keep doing that to yourself to go. And that's fine if you draw the line at V Mesh or Palisade or whatever you want, but make sure you're drawing that line to, to be honest with yourself to go, is that the best? Is it tall enough, is it easy enough to get through? And then the next perimeter would be the actual containers themselves or the drive up units themselves. And we'd always advise a kind of a CCTV perimeter. And that CCTV perimeter can then detect anybody coming over that fence onto the container behind the containers and send them events to somebody like us. But you're protecting your, your outer layer first. Which I always say is the disadvantage of outdoor storage versus indoor is that indoor storage has got walls. So it's giving you that more physical permit. You've got your fencing and then you've got a building wall which you can get an intruder alarm attached to and stop people coming in the fire doors. Whereas with the container storage, if you don't have the cameras around the perimeter, you bring in it in a layer that can come over the fence. Then come to the doors before you pick them up. At this point, they're at the door minimum. Starting advice would usually be, if it's outdoor storage, start with a CCTV perimeter and good fencing, access control in and out so that we can see logs of how long has someone been on site after use the system, how you're asking them to, just to try to spot anything suspicious on the access control, internal storage. Again, most of the building regulations point you at most of the things you should do, which would be alarm the fire doors, alarm your staff and reception areas when they leave, or if they're not there at all. And then if you've got unit alarms, perfect, because the unit alarms can be connected to the signaling for the alarm, which we can receive. So therefore we've got fire doors, staff, reception areas, shutters and the unit alarms and then CCTV so that we can view at least key areas, minimum of key areas. So cameras on entrance, exit, cameras on perimeter, and as many cameras as you can justify in your lobby areas and your corridors. Cool.

What about, like, there's a, you know, the topic of AI, which is always kind of an interesting topic to touch on because it means so much and can mean so many different things, but, you know, obviously, there's obviously a bit of AI involved in your services and what, what you do. How is that changing your product and tech in general in the industry that you see, from a security point of.

View, we can apply something called AI filtering. So all of the events that we receive, all of these different video events, they could be somebody coming in from a perimeter, it could be someone going into a certain designated area that they're not allowed to be in. We receive all of that and a lot of them are false at times because you get a lot of things like trees can blow into the deception area. You can get installers configure the detection zone incorrectly so that it's picking up a public area, so it's picking outside of the site. And we apply our AI filtering to them cameras to reduce the activations. So we've done that for ever since. We've up to the five years, five and a half years that DeSox existed, we've done the AI filtering. That's not really all that new. What we did is we looked at the amount of filtering that was doing and we thought, could we get this to do some other object classification? Could we do something clever with this? Could we say when this is. We're talking to the AI now, really, to the program, to the machine learning and Saying when you receive events that you decide are people after said time, if their face is covered, send that to our human operator and call it suspicious activity.

Yeah.

So the first object classification we've pushed through our suspicious activity AI is if a person's face is covered. But in terms of the impact of the on the sector, you can imagine what you could then do with that because this camera then knows a lot more than just that. We just now need to figure out what's a practical use of it, what's an efficient use of that, what's the next object classification that makes sense? How can we apply it on scale? Because that's what we always need to think. We need to think like at the minute we're receiving way over a million alarms a month and we've got to filter them with tech and with people processes. And last thing you want to do is start selling a new AI service that's not the right one. And then the scale of the events that you receive is huge and you can't manage them. So I think, I think, I think I've answered that. What I've tried to add, there was so many technical tangents I could have gone off.

Well, you managed to avoid it and not confuse me, so I think that was good. Okay, what about like, do you ever come in, in the morning and somebody's like, did you see what happened last night? Look at this. And you kind of stand there and you're like, what on earth is going on there? Like, what? And the end up kind of everyone's watching and laughing. Do you have any examples of like. And I can even think of one or two at my own site. So, like, I know this happens.

Yeah. I actually asked, I asked one of the guys in the office because I usually get asked this question on, on something like this. So far, my own experience and my own experience, the one that I always say on any of these, because it's just brilliant. I was working. It wasn't actually a desoc one. I was working as an account manager for one of the local councils and I was doing a footage review of actually a quite serious incident. But whilst doing it, I thought just in the corner of the screen, I was like, is that a banana? It was like a massive banana. What the hell? So we zoomed in to have a little look what was going on. And it was a man dressed as a banana, obviously from some kind of fancy dress night out, trying to steal some chips off a homeless man.

Oh.

And I was like, I will never see that ever again. For as long as I live, I will never see a man dress as a banana arguing over chips. So that's my, that's my one. The guys here see all sorts. You can imagine, like it's members of the public, like the way they act. It's just extreme. Like people with no clothes on. We've seen that, we've seen that literally.

Just at storage sites or.

Yeah. Just wonder. Yeah. One in particular just wandered on. Absolutely nothing on at all. Walked on like he was. Walked on. Like you just find, you know, I'm just coming into this storage site and then check my unit out. It didn't present as unusual other than the fact it had absolutely zero clothes on.

Yeah. Because like that your AI wouldn't have picked it up because not only were they not wearing a. A balance. Lava, there's actually nothing on at all.

Nothing on at all. Yeah. So he's just, he's just a person activation. It was just like our person on site. Oh, is there. Okay, let's have a look. Okay. He's behaving all right. Other than the fact he's got absolutely zero clothes on.

Oh, man.

So, yeah, they'd be the two, I'd reckon.

Nice one. Well, Ant, just before we wrap things up, if, like, if you're an operator listening to this, what's the. And you want, you want to catch people walking about in the nude or with. From both ends of the scale, like, what's the best way to reach out to DSOC and you know, to get, get security on your site.

Yeah. Well, if you don't, if it's not in an airport, catching me on a delayed flight or a trade show. Yeah. Check out our website. I'd say so www.DSocDSoc.uk I'd say check the website out. If you contact an email, it'd be info sock.uk but that's the best place because there's lots of case study material on there as well. And I'm always conscious that because my default is technical, I go quite deep with it sometimes. Whereas actually in practice, remote monitoring is quite a simple practice. It's start with an alarm, then a camera and see where you go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hugh, thanks for having me on.

Thanks, Ant. Cheers.

Thank you very much.

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