Amid city-wide expansions, Parramatta needed to maintain consistent, high-quality security without operational fragmentation or reliance on siloed systems that cannot scale. The urban transformation effort was led by Mohamed Al Salemi, Security Platform Specialist for the city, who championed a shift from isolated systems to a unified, platform-based software architecture designed for long-term scalability, interoperability and operational efficiency.
The City’s journey began in 2014 with a modest deployment of 20 Milestone-connected cameras. As Parramatta grew, the City’s security responsibilities expanded— particularly after 2018, when crime prevention and building security operations were consolidated.
Fragmentation introduced inefficiencies and potential risk, requiring operators to switch between different VMS interfaces, follow site-specific workflows, and manually coordinate incident response across inconsistent legacy systems. Continuing to add technologies without a unified design framework would ultimately weaken, rather than strengthen, the City’s overall security capability.
Rather than retrofitting each system in isolation or forcing sites into a single proprietary ecosystem, Mohamed Al Salemi led a platform strategy grounded in openness, interoperability, and smart architectural design. The first step was to standardize the City’s access control environment, creating a consistent foundation for identity, credential, and alarm management across all future projects. This ensured that as video systems were consolidated, identity-driven workflows could remain uniform and predictable.
Milestone XProtect VMS was selected as the primary video management system — not simply as a product choice, but as the backbone of an integrated video architecture. XProtect was deliberately designed to integrate with legacy camera fleets, varied access control systems, custom automation platforms, community booking systems, and broader building management technologies.
The City deployed BriefCam video analytics, integrated directly into the SOC workflow. This enables operators to rapidly search and analyze large volumes of video footage, significantly reducing the time required to locate persons of interest, assist vulnerable members of the public, or support incident response. It also delivers live and post-event analytics, including traffic flow insights and situational awareness during large events. The City is actively expanding its use of BriefCam to ensure analytics scale alongside its broader security ecosystem, reinforcing the platform’s role in supporting proactive, data-driven operations.
Today, Parramatta operates a large-scale video security environment supporting thousands of camera streams across the central business district and more than 110 facilities citywide. The City’s SOC now functions within a true single-pane-of-glass environment — a direct outcome of the standardized architectural approach.
Operators can respond to alarms with automatically surfaced camera views, navigate unfamiliar buildings using visual floor plan overlays, switch seamlessly between facilities without changing workflows, and rely on tight integration between door events and video footage. Both legacy and modern systems are managed through a single interface, creating a level of operational consistency that significantly improves situational awareness and decision-making, particularly during high-pressure incidents. This architectural simplicity has allowed the SOC to scale efficiently, without requiring proportional increases in staffing.
With the unified platform established, the City is planning its next phase. Following a successful trial of the Milestone Arcules cloud and hybrid system across multiple sites, additional locations running legacy platforms have been identified for upgrade and integration. The environment has been deliberately designed to support hybrid cloud models, fully cloud-based deployments, remotely connected edge sites, and low-footprint infrastructure configurations. This flexibility ensures the City can continue to scale its operations while reducing on-premise hardware requirements, improving system resilience, and future-proofing its service delivery model.
As part of its future-focused roadmap, the City of Parramatta has completed a trial of BrighterAI, reinforcing its commitment to privacy-by-design in a large-scale public surveillance environment. With thousands of camera feeds operating in public spaces, protecting personal data and individual identities remains a critical priority. BrighterAI enables the City to securely export video footage while automatically anonymizing individuals who are not relevant to an incident, preserving privacy without compromising the integrity or evidentiary value of the footage. This capability provides an additional layer of governance and public trust, ensuring the City can continue to expand its security operations while meeting strict privacy expectations and maintaining confidence in how video data is managed and shared.