Cloud based video surveillance allows users to remotely store, manage, record, play, and monitor surveillance footage entirely on the cloud. The advantages include cost efficiency, remote access to data, secure data storage, and high reliability, among many others.

“The market is ready”

Rishi Lodhia is Managing Director for Eagle Eye Networks, an American company that offers cloud-based video surveillance. He believes that the major benefits of the cloud are that end users do not need to have large hard drives in on site, and do not have to manage video surveillance themselves, or update software since everything is managed centrally.

Rishi Lodhia says: “We get a lot of inquiries from retail but also from others. We offer the services both to small companies and to large organisations such as hospitals and to companies operating in thousands of different locations”

He believes that the market is ready for cloud services and that a shift is underway right now. The IT industry has already made the shift and video surveillance and access control are two of few technologies that have not fully taken the step towards the cloud.

“End customers are driving demand for cloud services in video surveillance and are already used to paying a monthly fee for various services. Retailers and integrators also see the benefits of this business model with recurring revenues”, says Rishi Lodhia.

Håkan Johansson, Axis Communications´ Sales Manager for Northern Europe, is also very positive about cloud services. He says: “With hosted cloud solutions you avoid some start-up costs, and since someone else is managing it for you, there is no need to think about cost for services, upgrades and so on. Paying a monthly fee seems to be very popular for many and especially for small end customers.”

Storage at the edge

Cloud solutions are not the only way to avoid local network video recorders and centralised storage. For example, Micron Senior Director of Segment Marketing, Amit Gattani, stresses their latest 1TB micro SD card enables users of video surveillance systems to capture and store more than three months of high-quality video footage at the edge. This makes it cheaper for small- to mediumsized deployments to have primary storage in the camera compared to a centralised storage architecture.

Has lagged behind

Josh Woodhouse, principal analyst of video surveillance technology at IHS Markit, thinks video surveillance has lagged behind the wider IT industry in adopting the cloud and the reason why is the amount of data it generates. He says: “That means that the cost of bandwidth is still quite high and can put quite a lot of people off from a cost point of view. The data that has been required to be restored has generated a huge external storage market for video surveillance. That on its own is in excess of a billion dollars and that is separate to the video surveillance equipment camera and management software industry.”

However, Josh Woodhouse says cloud migration is happening, particularly in small installations with a fewer numbers of cameras, typically under eight cameras per site:

“Quick service retail is a good example, there is an increasing amount of VsaaS or cloud adoption there for video surveillance. It also can work quite well in terms of tying together multi-site installations and having anyone use the cloud to view or manage any camera in that network. But typically, even in those examples, it is still a hybrid approach, where there is significant onsite infrastructure still from storage point of view”

Vanderbilt President David Sullivan has a clear opinion in the matter of why cloud solutions have not been more widely adopted. He says: “The problem is that the installers are sometimes reluctant to make the change and I think that is because they do not know how to deal with some of the obstacles they encounter”.

Cyber security

More cloud solutions mean cyber security becomes even more important. Håkan Johansson, Sales Director for Northern Europe at Axis Communications, says even though the industry has been working with network products and IoT for a long time, cyber security issues have caught the industry by surprise. However, he believes products are safer today compared to a couple of years ago. He says: “But at the same time, the threats are evolving all the time, you need to keep up the good work at all times”.

Mobotix CEO Thomas Lausten argues cyber security is a trend that has started in some markets but has now moved into other areas. He says: “And therefore we believe we will see a much stronger trend towards cyber security in an everyday business aspect. It will be as important as it is today to have a high-resolution camera.”