You can have the greatest cameras and video recorders, but without software to manage and analyze the video, you might miss out on the greatest benefits of having a video solution.
Depending on your needs, some video management solutions can use motion detection to prompt events, read license plates on vehicles in a parking lot, detect added or removed objects from a room, and more. Additionally, apart from loss prevention uses, video management software and analytics have found great uses in airport, university and hospital applications.
With video management solutions becoming increasingly feature rich, as well as more cost effective, you may be in the market to upgrade or expand your current system. We’ve gathered practical tips to help guide you.
1. Look at the big picture.
First, ask the important questions. Who is going to run the software? Will they also implement it? Will you need external help and if so, how much? Will you need consulting services to help you decide what to do? How about integrators? Remember that these systems are not ‘set-it-and-forget-it’. You need a plan to care for it and keep it going. You’ve got to be thinking sustainability for the long haul to keep it working the way you want it to.
Make sure you’re doing a full evaluation. Look around the property because the reality is that if you’re upgrading technology that’s so old it’s ready to be upgraded, the tone and culture and feel of your building have also probably changed. The original intent of some of your cameras and some of the locations and equipment might no longer apply.
Completing a risk assessment is a great first step as well. It’s just to understand the vulnerabilities, where the exposures are, where the greatest likelihood of there being a problem might be. Where are there issues that may cause the greatest amount of disruption or loss?
2. Be clear about your expectations.
Your expectations may not line up with your budget. In other words, you may not need all of the features you want or think you need, so it’s important to communicate everything you expect your system to do to your integrator or vendor. Expectations are everything from image quality, to how much storage you’ll have, to how much ability you’ll have to expand the system in the future. You need to make sure everyone is on the same page. Usually people having a certain expectation, and then they’re disappointed that the system doesn’t do what they thought it would because they didn’t communicate what they expected.
Similarly, the most expensive solution out there is not necessarily appropriate because these systems need to be proactively managed and maintained. If you don’t need sophisticated features, there are some solutions out there that really would fit the bill. Rather than focusing on features and functionality, spend some time to see what it takes to maintain the system because that is critically important in evaluating and making sure that your system is there for you when you need it.
3. Find the best storage solution for your needs.
Whether you decide to go with cloud-based or on-site storage will likely depend on cost effectiveness, as well as the capabilities your organization has to deal with the large amount of bandwidth and storage video data requires. Using cloud backup along with on-site storage is a no-brainer. We back up every so often so that it improves our retention. It has saved me many times when things have gone awry on site.
Over time, cloud based service providers have understood the need to provide adequate security to the data they’re storing on their customers’ behalf. Taking management of storage clusters off of your security or IT department and having that service provided for you is attractive.
It is recommended to put SD cards in cameras as well for those times when outages occur. It’s one of those things that people wish they would have known beforehand. There have been times where people have had a network outage and they’ve lost the footage for that camera because the stream is pulled real-time from it. Thankfully, these incidents haven’t been major, but we believe in the power of using SD cards as a buffer. There are so many variables when you’re doing IP-based video archiving that you just want to have some kind of backup at the device itself.
Source: SercurityMagazine