Roving cover: one guard, many places, honest limits
Roving security moves inside the site — floors, corridors, car parks, stairwells, back-of-house — rather than around its boundary. It suits properties where the risk is distributed and no single point justifies a permanent guard.
Where it genuinely works
- Multi-storey car parks — high-incident, low-value-per-point, impossible to post statically.
- Office buildings after hours — checking that doors are secured and floors are clear.
- Retail back-of-house — stockrooms, service corridors, staff entrances.
- Multiple small sites in one area, covered by one rover.
The trade-off, stated plainly
A roving guard is somewhere else most of the time. That is the entire economic proposition — you accept discontinuous coverage in exchange for covering ten locations at the price of one.
Any provider implying you get static-level protection at patrol prices is selling you a misunderstanding you will discover during an incident.
The number that decides it
Revisit interval. How long between visits to any given point?
Twenty minutes is meaningful coverage. Ninety minutes is a walk-through with a security label on it. Before signing, work out the actual interval: number of points, time per point, travel time between them. Providers rarely volunteer this arithmetic, because it frequently shows the coverage is thinner than the proposal implies.
Blind spots are the deliverable
A good roving guard finds the stairwell door that never latches, the loading bay left open at 6pm, the fire exit propped for a smoke break. The value is the intelligence, not the walk. If your patrol reports say only "all clear", nobody is looking.
