Walk into any mid-size office building in East Memphis today and you’ll probably see something that wasn’t there eighteen months ago: a thermal camera mounted on a tripod near the front desk, scanning foreheads as people walk through the lobby. Some of them work well. Some of them flag everyone who just came in from the cold. All of them cost money that nobody budgeted for in 2019.
COVID has done more to accelerate security technology adoption in Memphis than any single factor in the past decade. Businesses that resisted spending on cameras, access control, and monitoring for years suddenly found themselves writing checks. When the choice is “install temperature screening or stay closed,” the technology budget appears fast.
The question now is whether this spending spree sticks around after the pandemic fades, or whether it becomes another round of equipment that collects dust in a closet. Based on what we’re seeing in the Memphis market, the answer depends entirely on company size.
Thermal Cameras: The Gold Rush That’s Already Cooling
In the spring of 2020, thermal temperature screening cameras were almost impossible to get. Lead times stretched to eight weeks. Prices for a decent unit ran $3,000 to $8,000. Companies like FLIR, Hikvision, and Dahua couldn’t manufacture them fast enough. Memphis security integrators were fielding calls from every office building, church, school, and warehouse in Shelby County.
A year later, the market has shifted. Prices have dropped 30 to 40 percent. Supply has caught up with demand. And a growing number of public health experts are questioning whether thermal screening actually works as a COVID mitigation tool. Asymptomatic carriers don’t have fevers. Someone who took Tylenol before arriving won’t trigger the alarm. The technology catches one specific symptom, and it’s not the most reliable one.
Still, businesses keep buying them. The reason is partly practical and partly psychological. A thermal camera in the lobby tells employees and visitors that management is taking COVID seriously. It’s security theater in the most literal sense, and in early 2021, plenty of companies are fine with that trade-off.
For security firms, the play now isn’t selling thermal cameras as standalone products. It’s bundling them into access control systems. A thermal camera paired with a card reader and a door controller creates a single entry point that checks temperature, verifies credentials, and logs everything. That kind of integrated system has value beyond COVID.
Touchless Access Control Is Here to Stay
If thermal cameras are a COVID fad, touchless access control is the opposite. This technology was gaining traction before the pandemic, and COVID turned it into a requirement overnight.
The old model of punching a code on a keypad or pressing a thumb to a biometric reader feels wrong now. People don’t want to touch shared surfaces. Memphis businesses, especially medical offices, law firms, and financial institutions, have been replacing keypads and fingerprint readers with mobile credential systems. Your phone becomes your key. You hold it near a reader and the door unlocks. No contact required.
Openpath, Brivo, and HID are the brands showing up most often in Memphis installations. Pricing for a four-door system runs $5,000 to $12,000 depending on hardware and licensing. That’s more expensive than a traditional keypad setup, but the maintenance costs are lower and tenants actually prefer using it.
The local company to watch in this space is SentryNet, the Memphis-based monitoring firm on Sycamore View Road. SentryNet has been in the monitoring business since the 1990s, handling alarm signals for residential and commercial clients across the Mid-South. They’ve been expanding into cloud-based access control monitoring, positioning themselves as the local alternative to national monitoring centers. For Memphis security companies that don’t want to send their alarm signals to a call center in Dallas, SentryNet is an obvious partner.
Cloud Video Changes the Economics
Traditional video surveillance meant a DVR or NVR sitting in a closet, recording footage to a local hard drive. If you wanted to review footage, you drove to the site, logged into the recorder, and scrubbed through hours of video. If the recorder got stolen or damaged, you lost everything.
Cloud-based video surveillance is changing that model entirely. Companies like Verkada, Rhombus, and Eagle Eye Networks offer cameras that stream footage directly to the cloud. No on-site recorder needed. You watch live feeds from your phone. Footage is stored off-site and encrypted. If someone steals the camera, you still have the video.
Memphis businesses are adopting cloud video at different rates. Larger property management companies and corporate campuses with IT departments have been early adopters. Smaller businesses, especially owner-operated retail shops and restaurants, tend to balk at the monthly subscription fees. A Verkada system might cost $400 per camera per year in licensing. For a restaurant owner on Summer Avenue running ten cameras, that’s $4,000 a year on top of the hardware cost. The local alarm company down the street will sell them a DVR system with no monthly fees.
That price gap is real, and it’s creating a two-tier market in Memphis. Companies with budgets get modern, cloud-connected systems. Everyone else keeps running ten-year-old analog cameras that record grainy footage nobody ever looks at.
Body Cameras and GPS: The Guard-Level Tech
Technology adoption isn’t just about building systems. It’s filtering down to individual security officers.
Body cameras for security guards have become standard practice at the larger national firms operating in Memphis. Allied Universal and Securitas issue body cameras to officers at certain high-profile posts, particularly healthcare facilities and government buildings. The footage protects the client, protects the guard, and protects the security company from false complaints and liability claims.
Smaller Memphis firms are slower to adopt body cameras, mostly because of cost. A basic body camera runs $100 to $300 per unit. The real expense is storage and management. Footage has to be downloaded, stored, cataloged, and retained for a specific period. Without a system for managing that data, body cameras create more problems than they solve. A $150 camera generates gigabytes of footage every shift. Multiply that by twenty guards and you need infrastructure.
GPS tracking for patrol vehicles is another technology that’s becoming expected rather than optional. Clients want proof that the patrol car actually drove through their property at 2 a.m. instead of parking at the QuikTrip on Getwell Road. GPS systems like those from Quartix or GPS Trackit log every stop, every route, and every deviation. The data shows up on a dashboard that the client can access.
Some guards hate it. Managers love it. Clients demand it. The firms resisting GPS tracking are losing bids to competitors who offer it as a standard feature.
The Real Time Crime Center Connection
Memphis PD’s Real Time Crime Center, the operation behind the Blue CRUSH predictive policing program, has been quietly building relationships with private security camera networks across the city. The concept is straightforward: businesses that install cameras on their property can register those cameras with MPD. When a crime occurs nearby, detectives can request footage from registered private cameras without having to go door-to-door asking businesses to check their DVRs.
The program has been around for several years, and participation is voluntary. Yet the pandemic has accelerated sign-ups. More cameras going in at more businesses means more potential footage sources for the Real Time Crime Center. For security companies installing cameras at client sites, registering with the RTCC program is an easy value-add. It costs nothing, it gives the client a direct connection to law enforcement, and it positions the security company as a community partner rather than just a vendor.
The Gap That’s Growing
The technology divide in Memphis’s security industry is widening. National firms like Allied Universal, Securitas, and GardaWorld have corporate R&D budgets, technology partnerships with major manufacturers, and the scale to deploy new systems across hundreds of client sites. A small Memphis firm with thirty guards and a handful of contracts doesn’t have that kind of buying power.
This gap shows up in proposals. When a large property management company puts out an RFP for security services, they’re increasingly asking about technology capabilities. Can you provide cloud-based incident reporting? Do your guards have body cameras? Can you integrate with our access control system? Do you offer real-time GPS tracking of patrol vehicles?
Smaller firms that answer “no” to those questions are getting passed over, even when their guard quality and local relationships are stronger. It’s an uncomfortable reality, and it’s pushing some local operators to seek partnerships or invest in technology they might not fully understand yet.
The companies finding a middle path are the ones partnering with local integrators and monitoring firms rather than trying to build everything in-house. A small guard company doesn’t need its own cloud video platform. It needs a relationship with an integrator who can bundle those capabilities into client proposals. In Memphis, those partnerships between guard companies and technology providers are forming right now. The firms that figure out the right partnerships will survive. The ones that ignore the technology question won’t.