A new era in video surveillance is here thanks to Cloudview’s innovative cloud-based solution.
In 2021, a couple of very expensive electric bikes were stolen from residents of a modern complex, from a so-called “secure bike shed” with five CCTV cameras in the vicinity. When the theft was reported to the property manager, they were asked to get an incident number from the police so they could look into it and follow GDPR compliance. This took time and felt like they were just going round in circles. It was later revealed that only one out of three of the cameras on site were working at any one time. They spent hours scrolling through the footage not knowing when the incident happened in the last 30 days and then realised that the CCTV had stopped functioning as it needed a software update.
Part of the problem with residential security lies in the low expectations for video surveillance and apathy from property managers in maintaining the systems. In the residential complex cited, there are 200 video IP-based video cameras networked back to a control room and connected to a Network Video Recorder and server which stores up to a month of video. Due to the inherent limitations of these systems, there is no way of knowing if a given camera is working or not.
With the advent of ubiquitous cloud connectivity, low-cost cloud storage, smart video cameras, artificial intelligence and the integration of subjective data (video), with objective data (events, triggers, metadata), a new era of video security applications and interesting, new use-cases await exploitation.
Starting with a clean slate, it’s easy to define the capabilities of a video surveillance system for the above apartment complex. Cloudview is an example of a cloud-based surveillance solution that can prevent future residential security threats by doing the following: only recording events when they happen (people movement, doors opening, vehicles detected); storing all events directly in the cloud and thereby making them accessible from anywhere (to alleviate theft of the NVR), with the ability to create alerts for security personnel; filtering on all the events from a specific camera and for a selected period; showing all related events for any of the 200 cameras in the development once a time frame is identified.
In addition to the above, Cloudview’s solution can show how a perpetrator has entered and exited the complex and can provide the actual theft footage as complete evidence to legal authorities. Security and property managers get daily reports on the status of each of the cameras so that they have visibility into their security operations. Most importantly, the solution provides residents in the development the service and security they are paying for and the peace of mind they expect.