Video surveillance isn’t what it used to be, even a few years ago. Traditionally, it was more of a reactive tool that could help with investigations once an incident has already occurred. Today, however, advances in technology are turning traditional video surveillance systems into proactive tools that can help identify–and potentially stop–threats before they escalate.
Thanks to the advent of video analytics, AI capabilities, and more powerful cameras, security teams can now use video intelligence to detect, analyze, and report on events of interest in real-time. Valuable video intelligence tools can now help security professionals prevent everything from minor disturbances to potentially dangerous situations from escalating.
Incorporating video into your alarm monitoring operations is essential, and today you have many options for pulling multiple video signals into a unified dashboard, allowing you to quickly review and respond to events as they develop.
Still, given the massive leap in potential we’ve seen in just the past few years, how can you ensure that the video surveillance technology you put into place today can serve you well in the future? These are the big ideas that can help you future-proof your video surveillance and keep you ahead of what’s next.
Strategy #1: Boost your camera power
Is it time to upgrade your cameras with the freshest technology? If your video is slow, laggy, or fuzzy, you can enhance operations by upgrading to a newer generation of cameras. We’ve seen many iterations of video technology as it moved steadily from classic DVRs to NVRs and IP cameras, cloud VMS and AI systems. Today, video surveillance is rooted firmly in the cloud and relies less and less on bulky analog hardware.
The newest cameras also come with AI-enabled features that can provide more powerful footage review, incident investigation, and–most importantly–real-time risk detection. Still, every camera offers different benefits, so you have to decide: is your priority having the highest 4K resolution? Infrared or night vision? The ability to zoom? Easy installation? Different choices come with different advantages, and you may decide you need very different cameras for different use cases.
Video surveillance systems also come with several different AI capabilities to choose from. For example, the most classic, and now common, use of AI would be for motion, people, and vehicle detection, which triggers recordings or alerts based on relevant movements inside the frame. You can also use these cameras to analyze facility occupancy or identify where people and vehicles tend to congregate. A step above that, next-level AI features might incorporate facial recognition as well as vehicle (or license plate) recognition.
And finally, there are the newest generation of AI assistants and cameras with features like action detection. At this level, an AI assistant could prompt you about events developing on-site, or alert you to unauthorized access or unsafe employee behavior. You can even run a visual search to quickly identify specific objects of people across every single camera on the network. That is a huge leap forward from reviewing hours of video footage, looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
There is a lot of choice, but you don’t have to hone in on a single solution. It’s quite possible that you opt for very different cameras with different capabilities tailored to how you’ll be using them. This is where choosing the right alarm monitoring software, which can integrate multiple camera signals and technologies, will be essential–and we’ll get to that next.
Strategy #2: Be sure you can integrate with existing–and future–technologies
Technology is always going to change rapidly–but that doesn’t mean you should change out your entire security architecture every time there’s a new video surveillance system on the market. The best way to future-proof your operation is to choose alarm monitoring software that can easily integrate with your existing, or legacy, systems while scaling to meet whatever the future comes up with next.
The right software should allow you to integrate every sensor and signal you use now–or choose to add in the future. This includes everything from multiple video surveillance systems to hundreds of other sensors and signals reaching decades into the past.
You shouldn’t have to replace existing hardware just because something new comes along: being able to integrate what’s already working for you is already a future-forward decision. Just be sure that your software of choice allows you to swap different security elements (like cameras) in and out and that it can scale with you for years to come.
Strategy #3: Send it up into the cloud
Let’s get practical about the realities of video, all the data that entails, and the related storage challenges that come with it. Video can become cumbersome if you’re storing all of that data on-site–so why not free it and let it float safely into the cloud? When you don’t have to store all the data at your own physical location, you also don’t have to maintain, update, and worry about more equipment. Moving to the cloud gives you more space–and with that, more freedom to do new things.
Not only can you store footage longer, add more cameras, or expand your video capabilities without personally building out more of the physical data storage solutions to do so, but you can make the most of tools like cloud-based evidence lockers for evidence management. Moving to the cloud means you can even expand operations or run a multi-site constellation of facilities while seamlessly keeping everyone in the know, and everything connected.
This can free you up to collaborate with colleagues in new ways, sharing live and recorded video footage with your team, external authorities, and emergency responders swiftly and securely. Using an alarm monitoring platform like Bold Group’s Manitou, for example, you can give authorized team members remote access to relevant data from a variety of cloud-connected devices, in real time.
Whether you migrate everything to the cloud immediately or adopt a hybrid approach is up to you–but think of the cloud as an extra space that expands your possibilities, helps you stay flexible, and future-proofs your video surveillance (and other) operations.
Strategy #4: Look again at your video security
Now let’s talk about who will watch the watchers. That is, if you’re using video surveillance to keep people and facilities safe…how are you keeping yourself safe?
Here’s what we mean: many camera systems are not inherently secure and send unencrypted data back and forth. If you connect these cameras to the cloud, you need to assume they have the potential to be compromised, even within a secure and trusted network. To defend against this vulnerability, you can look for camera systems that encrypt data in transit and at rest, and incorporate strong access control, authentication and authorization, and rotating or expiring keys and tokens.
Another important note: not just any camera or video surveillance system will do. Who manufacturers these systems, and where, plays into current questions of national security. If you do business with any federal agency or bid for a federally-funded project, for example, the cameras you use must be NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) compliant. The John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act of 2019, section 889, prohibits using any video surveillance equipment or services manufactured by specific Chinese companies. While these are often the most affordable camera brands on the market, they may also be riddled with backdoors and exploits that can give outside parties, or nations, access to your footage.
Strategy #5: Bolster your IT investment and choose the right software solutions
With great tools comes great responsibility: at least, that’s how we feel about the quickly-advancing range of security cameras and cloud-based video surveillance options. With so many different cameras and solutions to sift through, to the very real cybersecurity risks that any new technology can introduce to your operations, it’s essential to invest in a well-staffed, well-resourced IT team and the right software tools.
Cameras today aren’t like the cameras of yesterday–you can’t just set them up and check back in a year or two. Maintaining and monitoring them is an ongoing responsibility, especially as their added analytics and advances like AI capabilities make them more essential to day-to-day operations.
Having the right team and the right software in place can be the ultimate way to future-proof your video surveillance. And we’d love to help you do it: contact us today to see how Bold Group’s Manitou software can help your organization get ready for whatever the future may hold next–safely, securely, and with confidence.