You may currently have a security and surveillance camera system in place that are seemingly doing the job, but chances are you experience hassles and inconveniences . As with everything, technologies continue to make advancements and there have been some big changes that have recently occurred with security camera systems to eliminate those dreaded issues. If you are experiencing one or more of the following instances, it is probably time to start looking into upgrading your current system.
Where's the video?
Has it ever happened in the past, where an incident has occurred (theft, vandalism, assault, etc.) and upon attempting to view the video footage you are disappointed to find the camera wasn't working correctly during the incident?
This often raises lots of questions from administration, board members and tax-payers, as they want to understand why they invested money into a system that isn't performing the simple task it was meant to do. It can also cause a lot of embarrassment and stress to the team who manages the system.
Modern solutions have the ability to send an alert immediately if a camera has gone down or a storage device has failed to avoid this situation of no video footage from occurring. The money invested to upgrade an older system can quickly be recouped by allowing your organization the ability to prevent theft or vandalism and avoid any potential legal issues.
Are you having to watch hours of Video to find specific footage?
If there was an incident overnight or on the weekend, do you or your staff need to sit and watch hours of video in order to find that specific events video footage? Most people do like to watch videos, but those hours should be spent watching Netflix, not six hours of video watching the empty school parking lot to find the exact time the vandalism occurred.
Cutting edge security camera solutions have modern search and retrieve capabilities that will now help you find video of incidents in a matter of seconds or minutes, rather than hours.
The best solutions have the ability to do a grid motion search, where you can find when any activity happened in a particular area, to greatly reduce the amount of time required to find particular incidents. Save the popcorn for the weekend and evenings while watching high-quality TV and movies at home, and free up your time to focus on more important duties.
Making trips to multiple sites to retrieve Video
Many organizations have locations scattered across a geographical area. If you are required to jump in your car, or even walk to another building to access and view video it's safe to say your current system is out-dated.
Most enterprise class camera system's should allow you to view and retrieve video from any location, on any device. This would include accessing the system from the comfort of your home, or if you are lucky enough, on a beach with a cold drink in your hand.
One thing you should not do, is open up ports in your network to allow for remote access. Doing this could expose your entire network to all sorts of cyber-security threats. If you are required to do this, it may be a better option to remove remote access and just travel to locations, rather than dealing with the headaches you'll likely encounter by exposing your network to hackers.
Network Video Records (NVRs) are one of the most hacked pieces of equipment on a network. The best modern security camera systems provide complete end-to-end security to allow for remote access, without putting your entire network at risk.
Other things that shouldn't be happening
If any of the following are also occurring during your day-to-day management of your security camera system, it may be a signal that it is time to investigate what other options are available in the market.
- Are you concerned or calculating how much storage space is required to keep all of your video for the required amount of time? With a modern security camera system you should never have to give a second thought to how much storage is available, nor be concerned about failed hard drives again.
- If the only way to save and share video is via burning to a thumb drive or disc, it's probably time to modernize your entire system. Cutting edge technologies would allow you to share secure links to video via an email or even a text message. This would include time stamps and setting a limitation for how long access will be available.
- Does the video quality look comparable to footage from the moon landing? If you are having difficulty identifying people or objects, it might be time to look at newer systems with high quality video capabilities.
So what's the next step?
It might be clear after reading this article, that it is time to consider upgrading to a newer system. Again, technologies are always changing and improving in order to make things simpler and easier to operate and maintain. Security and Surveillance Cameras are no different.
If you feel you are in the position to upgrade, it is time to start studying the market to determine what options are available for upgrading your security camera system.
