Cannabis Facility Security: Build for the Record the State Will Ask For

A licensed operation is judged on what it can produce on request. Not the equipment on the wall, the record. KSEDCO designs cannabis facility security in Georgia so that the evidence package exists as a by-product of normal operation, rather than as something assembled under pressure the week a question is asked.

What has to be producible

• A licensed-premises drawing showing controlled areas and the boundary of the approved premises.
• A stated purpose and the achieved field of view for each camera, along with the lighting condition it was verified under.
• Retention arithmetic built on measured bitrate, motion assumptions and redundancy, not a headline storage number.
• Time synchronization evidence, because an export with a questionable clock is worth very little.
• An export procedure naming authorized users, with a preservation and chain-of-custody step.
• An access role matrix, visitor and vendor logs carrying sponsorship and expiration, and the alarm response record.

The Georgia licensing picture

Georgia does not resemble a broad adult-use state, and design assumptions borrowed from one will be wrong. Georgia licenses low-THC production and dispensing separately from hemp handling and processing, and the rules have been amended recently sits under a different licensing track. Requirements differ by license type and by local jurisdiction, and they change. The licensee and its counsel determine what applies, and the security design translates the current rule text into specific views, doors, alarm points, retention and test evidence. There is no national camera count or retention period, and anyone quoting one has not read your license conditions.

The growing environment is the hard part

Cultivation and processing rooms defeat cameras chosen off a catalog page. High-pressure sodium fixtures throw a heavy amber spectrum and horticultural LED fixtures often run red and blue heavy. Both wreck automatic white balance and make any color description in an incident report unreliable. Cameras in these rooms should be commissioned with fixed white balance under the real lighting recipe, including the changeover between vegetative and flowering schedules and the dark period.

Humidity is the other half of it. Flower rooms, dry rooms and the corridors between them sit at very different dew points, and in Georgia the outdoor air offers no relief for most of the year. A camera or reader that crosses one of those boundaries will condense unless it is rated and mounted for the transition. Nutrient mixing, wash-down and trim areas corrode ordinary hardware and enclosures, so those spaces need sealed, corrosion-resistant selections rather than the general-purpose model used at the front counter.

Sightlines also move. Dense canopy and reflective wall material change what a fixed camera can see every few weeks, so a view verified at transplant may be useless at harvest. Verify late in the cycle, not early.

Infrastructure, and knowing what not to publish

Recorders, network equipment, the time source and power need protected locations and active health monitoring, because a storage failure nobody notices for three weeks is a records gap, not an inconvenience. Intrusion and duress should follow the response procedure the licensee already uses. Administrative and evidence privileges stay with named users and are reviewed on a schedule. Public-facing material stays general: camera positions, blind spots, credential design and response timing belong in protected records.

Revisit the design after any change to the license, the premises, the layout, the lighting or the inventory workflow. Any of those can invalidate a camera view or an access rule that was correct the month before.

KSEDCO, 2700 Cumberland Pkwy SE, Suite 410, Atlanta GA 30339. (888) 360-0035.