Most enterprises use CCTV footage or video surveillance footage to view live video of the premises or review security incidents. Taking advantage of intelligent video software minimizes the risk of theft and fraud, monitors and improves customer service, tracks performance trends, and identifies opportunities to strengthen different departments of the company. According to research, the video surveillance market was valued at $42.94 billion in 2019.
With an increase in surveillance footage by the day, a good idea is to move your videos from local storage to a cloud-based video platform. In this blog, we’ll give you a quick overview of how cloud storage works with its benefits and challenges. Furthermore, we have compared cloud-based video storage with local storage and will also introduce our platform VIDIZMO, which you can use to manage recorded footage.
How Cloud Video Surveillance Storage Works?
The main concept of the cloud is to access something remotely. Video surveillance footage is stored on remote servers, which can be accessed from anywhere and everywhere. Unlike CCTV systems, they don’t require technical configuration to access remotely, and storage is scaled up as required in cloud surveillance solutions. There are NVRs (Network Video Recording) designed to work with your cloud storage for video surveillance systems. A small hard drive is attached to store videos locally for a short amount of time before uploading them to the cloud.
Main features of using a cloud video storage are as follows:
-
Remote Accessibility
Surveillance staff and other authorized users can access the footage or videos remotely since the data is centrally stored. You can streamline visibility across the network through any device or browser.
-
Easy Maintenance
In terms of maintenance, cloud storage videos are easier to maintain with the highest security. It has a simple system setup and doesn’t require any hardware equipment or IT and security professional for system operability.
Source: TechRepublic
-
Scalable Storage
Another main feature is scalable storage, where the data storage capacity increases as the volume of videos increases of an ever-growing business. The scalability of video cloud storage enables teams to adjust to video retention needs without disturbing existing infrastructure.
Source: Cloudwards
-
Compliance
Cloud service providers often include configurations for regulating compliance, making it easier for companies in regulated industries to manage sensitive information.
Source: Okera
-
Backup
You can have your data automatically backed up in multiple places, a concept known as data redundancy. Same data is duplicated in copies either locally known as local redundancy or on multiple geo locations known as geo-spatial redundancy.
Source: UniTrends
5 Aspects to Consider Before Moving to a Cloud-Based Video Surveillance Storage
At the end of the day, defining where and how the cloud can boost your business depends on five primary requirements: bandwidth, cost, security, storage and accessibility.
1. Bandwidth
Uploading videos on the cloud requires bandwidth which many enterprises still struggle in bandwidth capacity. Captured by multiple IP cameras uploading a video on cloud with low bandwidth can take hours, limiting the video streaming.
2. Cost
Consider the challenge of cost is being tackled. You have an increasing bandwidth with the number of videos increasing day by day. The next challenge associated is the cost. As the number of videos increases with the bandwidth so is the scaling of storage and therefore, the cost.
3. Security
Given the risks such as financial, legal and reputational associated with data breaches and leaked video, enterprises are mainly concerned about ensuring the security and integrity of their video networks. Port forwarding, firewalls, network topology & video encryption can all have an impact on the security & protection of a cloud-based video surveillance system
4. Storage
Before migrating your video surveillance to the cloud, you need to foresee the videos that are never used because only specific events end up with a follow-up action that is rewatching the footage. So, purchased storage doesn’t get bottleneck.
5. Accessibility
Another aspect to consider is accessibility. Whether to have your data on-premises or be accessible through a third-party cloud provider considering the internal and external network quality.
Challenges Of Cloud Video Storage
To accommodate cloud-based video surveillance storage following will be the challenges to tackle
- Needless to say, you need to have a strong, reliable internet connection to prevent unpredictable gaps in coverage.
- Video retention law prevents certain industries from deploying cloud-based solutions as they don’t meet industry-specific compliance and security requirements.
- There is always the challenge of ‘learning curve’ when a business is accustomed to retrieving the footage from a local recorder.
- Another challenge is the high bandwidth consumption.
- Businesses with complex surveillance needs and high-resolution video requirements can expect to pay more, therefore, increasing the cost.
Cloud Video Storage Vs. Local Video Storage
Having surveillance storage on on-premise or cloud storage can vary in cost. While local video storage requires hardware equipment on-premise, such as on-premise recorders, cloud camera systems don’t require such equipment; the cost is of cloud storage itself.
Then comes the setup. NVR camera systems, which store video recording locally, are typically hard to maintain because of the many components required in order to operate the system. In contrast, the cloud has a much more simplified setup process with just a cloud camera, wiring to power the device, and a wireless router connecting to the internet.
Moreover, when we talk about storage capacity, most enterprise businesses utilize industrial PoE switches that support only 8 to 48 cameras, depending on local recorders. However, cloud cameras are deployable without depending on a recording device, making storage only dependent on their cloud subscription's amount of data capacity.
Why go through all the hassle when an enterprise video management system makes up for video surveillance storage?
A Cloud-based Video Management System, VIDIZMO!
VIDIZMO is a video management system that seamlessly ingests your surveillance video and saves it on a cloud-based storage, whether it is your own datacenter (on-premise) or any other third-party cloud service provider such as AWS and Azure. You don’t have to download videos to watch surveillance footage. Watch on the go, switch among videos and use our platform to live stream surveillance from multiple cameras and view it through one or multiple portals. Not only that, if you can maintain a log for who views recorded footage, who has the access or if you need to redact PII from these when sharing can be done through one system.
Swapping from a VMS to a cloud-based video surveillance system will be a good option. VIDIZMO makes sure that all your data is highly secured and compliant with industry-specific standards. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. You can upload, stream, store, and manage your live and on-demand videos for every end-to-end use case through our platform.
