Security Solutions: Is IP Video Surveillance Right for Your Business?

There are some decisions in life that don't feel like decisions at all; they just end up being overwhelmingly obvious. Choosing IP video surveillance for your organization is one of those. Why? Let's run through the list.

Benefits of IP Video Surveillance

In less technologically-advanced days, video surveillance was cumbersome and slow. By virtue of not being connected, analog solutions were isolated — but they were also faulty, difficult to search and notably sub-par in terms of quality.

IP surveillance, though, is affordable, easy to search, easy to manage and inexpensive to store.

More importantly, it can act as a deterrent to theft or poor, noncompliant behavior — though it won't prevent it, necessarily. At least if suspicious activity does occur, you'll have a way to find out.

Imagine, for example, you had a POS integrated with your IP video surveillance. It could trigger an alert whenever a manager's sign in was used, allowing you to track the actual user. Or, what if you had a region of your facility that was off-limits and you placed a camera in that area? In the past, you would have had to have known something was out of the ordinary in order to consider looking at the tapes. With IP surveillance, you might get an alert if there is motion in that region.

With these measures in place, you can start to look at characteristics or behavior that might be out of the ordinary, thereby protecting your business from emerging threats. Some systems even allow for a find and replace of sorts, such that if you knew something was stolen, you could find the exact moment the theft occurred. Given the recent trend of hardware theft (in order to access data), that's an important benefit.

Truly, IP video surveillance can be used in whatever way you need to use it to make you better at what you need to be better at. If you need to be better at creating audit trails for your security team, IP video surveillance can help. If you need to understand how your employees are spending their time in order to increase productivity, it can help with that, too.

And if you need to increase employee safety, there's almost no better way.

"There are kooky things happening," says Devi Momot, Twinstate's CEO. "And we need to be prepared for this world. Sometimes people's actions don't make sense, or aren't predictable. So you need to be skeptical and worried about your people's safety." A video solution where you can electronically release a door lock to let people into your building is a brilliant solution. Imagine if you could verify a package number and an expected delivery when the UPS driver arrived, before you unlocked the door? You wouldn't need to worry, then, about social engineering or safety threats.

What to Consider When Shopping

Now that you know the many benefits of IP video surveillance, you need to consider all of the goals you'd like to accomplish with it. If you would like to protect a certain set of assets or view your remote offices, you'll go into the purchasing process already knowing exactly where you need to place cameras and how they need to function.

Consider the following:

• Do you want audio and video?
• How long do you want to store your information?
• Do you want to be able to view it from home?
• Do you need to only be able to identify that someone was there, or do you need to be able to see facial details? Verify serial or model numbers?
• Does your solution need to record at night? How will it get light in that area?
• Do you need to be able to use this in a court of law? If so, does the solution you're looking at have identification tech built in, so you can verify the information's authenticity?

Ultimately, you want to be sure the technology you purchase for your security solutions is suitable for your application of that technology. You don't need to answer all of these questions prior to shopping, but you should expect any good vendor to ask them. If you’re looking at vendors that don’t ask these types of specific, tedious questions that make you think deeply, they’re probably not doing you justice.