A centralized surveillance system that keeps up with your business growth 

Nevertheless, any business is prone to theft should it not be properly protected, and the fact that there’s a possibility of a business being vandalized or sabotaged should motivate businesses to implement a sophisticated business surveillance system into their IT infrastructure. In fact, let’s first look at some of the common challenges an organization may face when choosing a surveillance solution.

Though it is not to say that every NVR vendor only supports its own branded cameras and devices, in practice, quite a number of NVR vendors only support a limited number of cameras and devices due to business reasons, so it’s quite often for businesses to ultimately settled and compromised on cameras that were not of their preferences. Moreover, if to examine from the other angle, it is complicated and costs quite a lot to replace the existing setup if they were to choose a surveillance solution that supports their preferred devices.

Traditional NVR vendors offer limited storage capacity and low flexibility to scale when needed. As the world becomes more digitally transformed, technology innovations also propel swiftly. Things like resolutions and qualities of the videos or numbers of the backup configured are putting these traditional NVR vendors into tests when it comes to keeping up with the growth of customers’ data usage. On top of it, as mentioned in the beginning, the growing needs and adoption of IP cameras, and the accelerating implementation of on-premise safety protocol such as compliance of keeping the longer duration of video footages all propel businesses to rethink surveillance strategies and the required storage space.  In other words, it has become inevitable for NVR vendors to provide greater scalability when it comes to surveillance storage.

Users often overlook expenses beyond hardware costs. In reality, a robust surveillance solution may be connected from multi-sites, consisting of several third-party components, and requiring maintenances and supports from different vendors. What comes along are the likes of multi-site VMS software subscription fees, third-party hardware integration expenses, or the hurdle of contacting multiple vendors to perform maintenance on different components of the surveillance system.

Once we have explored these modern challenges, it has become more coherent just what type of modern surveillance solution a business should consider, in which, device and camera integrability, storage scalability, and overall cost of ownership should be the top three priorities. Here are the things to look out for when selecting surveillance systems.

As mentioned, a handful of vendors still stringently regulate the device and camera compatibilities, giving these businesses limited options when selecting surveillance system components. To remedy such a challenge, a modern surveillance solution should alleviate such a hurdle by supporting multiple camera types including fisheye, PTZ, or multi-lenses, and the likes of ONVIF protocol. On top of it, I/O modules like door controllers, IP speakers, POS systems, intercoms, and IP speakers should also be integrated into the solution ecosystem, giving businesses plentiful options that match specific security needs.

Next, to address the storage needs for the growing surveillance storage and archiving demands, solution storage should be able to be expanded or paired with expansion units, bumping up the  storage capacity and allowing businesses to keep longer and larger size video recordings with higher  frame rates and longer duration. Such flexible scalability combined with advanced management  features drastically helps maximize storage efficiency.

As mentioned in the beginning, many additional costs can be derived from advanced features and  functionalities for a variety of VMS software. In reality, there are solutions out there that only require one-time hardware cost, and all built-in advanced features are made available to users, which  drastically decreases the total cost of ownership in the long run.