There’s no denying the fact that many businesses are ready to shift to more cloud-based infrastructure. It’s already in place in so many facets of business; from document sharing to banking (and everywhere in between). The trend toward more physical security management to the cloud was part of that shift.
But as we talked to more and more customers, and helped them adopt cloud into their security plans, we ran into issues stemming from the availability of bandwidth at a number of locations and sites.
The Challenge of Bandwidth
We can all relate to the role our bandwidth plays on our ability to work. Video calls and streaming video can significantly impact how our network performs and responsiveness. But it’s not only work-from-home employees that face this issue. Businesses also face it.
The more we heard about this challenge, the more we wanted to help address it. Some customers were in remote locations where network speeds were severely limited. Others needed to save bandwidth for daily business operations. Some had high camera counts resulting in an enormous amount of video data.
And still others needed to store video data locally to meet basic regulatory oversight requirements in certain markets. For example, a retailer or office may continuously record during business hours. If they have 15 cameras at their location, that means they are using roughly 30 Mbps to stream to the cloud. With the Edge Cloud solution, Arcules can reduce this down to an average of 10 Kbps per camera while recording during business hours, significantly saving bandwidth capability for more business-related needs.
Arcules has customers with thousands of cameras on site and during normal operations, they use a fair amount of bandwidth to record and save this video data. But if an incident occurs, where a lot of activity happens all at once, it can completely overwhelm the outbound bandwidth of these companies and it can interfere with the normal day-to-day operations. Having edge-based storage helps us offset that so we can record en masse tons of data and not have to move it out to the cloud and affect their day-to-day business. Arcules wants to provide the best solution based on their bandwidth needs, and this potentially means being able to change where video is stored depending on the location.
Management in the Cloud
While the storage is different, the management is largely the same. Customers leveraging the Edge Cloud solution can centralize the configuration and monitoring of their cameras and gateways. This means that there are still so many of the benefits of the Arcules platform used with storage on the edge.
Mix-and-Match Storage
As we’ve worked with customers of all sizes, we’ve largely found a broad mix of organizations with bandwidth challenges that varied by location. Some facilities, on the other hand, were able to establish cloud-based infrastructure with no limitations in place. So having two options for storage helps address the needs of organizations no matter what their network limitations are; they’re still able to manage all of their locations from the Arcules Cloud Platform.
Cloud Archival for Case Management
One of the core functions of video is to help organizations gather the information they need about a certain event. We call the collection of this evidence Case Management and with the new Edge Cloud solution, this can be done on-demand. Users can archive 60 minutes of video at a time and set up motion detection or alarm/rules-based notifications on camera footage, then create a case and take footage from single or multiple cameras into an evidence file to “live” in the cloud. This gives these users the true benefits of cloud storage and redundancy.
How It Works
We’ve made this awesome video to tell you a little about the Edge Cloud solution, but we’re also sharing that information here, too. Leveraging video data storage at the edge is as easy as identifying the amount of data you need to store, then working with an Arcules partner to enable local storage mode based on your subscription.
Once you receive your gateway, plug it in and find the devices on your network, you can use the Arcules Cloud Platform to set retention times on each camera for areas that need additional oversight. For example, a camera that oversees a check-in area might be required to keep footage for 14 days instead of a standard week. That camera can be specifically set to do so. Additionally, users have the ability to override the retention per channel if needed.
So What Now?
Whether you’re a small business or a global organization, you’re gathering large amounts of video data to use for not only physical security purposes, but also business optimization. The Edge Cloud solution can make it easier for numerous low-bandwidth locations to leverage the power of the Arcules Cloud Platform and achieve their goals.
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