Banking & Finance

A branch door opens onto the street, and who will walk through it is not known in advance. The queue, the customer representatives' desks and the teller line share one volume in most branches. The threshold between the area open to everyone and the area only staff may cross is often a single door. An access control table therefore defines not a person but which route that person may take, and at which hour.

Branches resemble one another, run to a large count and hold no permanent technical staff; the weight given to installation standards and remote serviceability comes from there. At head office and in trading operations the question shifts to continuity. Supply is redundant, the network runs over two separate paths, and when the UPS picks up the load nobody in the building should notice. After hours the offices empty while the ATM lobby stays open — the hours without staff are the hours that most need watching.

Looking for a recording long afterwards

In finance an incident is usually examined not on the day it happened but long after. For that examination to be worth anything it is not enough that the video was retained; the recording's clock has to be fed from the same source as the transaction log. In an archive whose time has drifted, the right frame cannot be found, and if it is found it cannot be shown to belong to a given transaction. The real load on the link between branch and head office is this backward searchability rather than live video.