Why cloud-based video security is exploding in popularity: Insights from Milestone
KEITH: Thanks for taking time to join us today. We have an interesting topic lined up for you. We're talking about cloud-based video surveillance. It's really taking off in business markets around the world. Business leaders have been researching cloud-based video security, and they have some questions. Just a few questions they have: What are the functionality and benefits? What are the security concerns and the cost considerations? People want to know more as they dive deeper into the technology.
Today, we want to provide you with some insights to these questions. There's more that everyone wants to know. Cloud-based video surveillance is increasingly popular. Many organizations are moving from on-premise systems to cloud-based surveillance software. Today, you're going to learn how video surveillance as a service can transform your security operations.
We have two great speakers lined up for you today. Alex Knapik has worked in technology, security and intelligence for over 20 years. Alex is passionate about the real-world impacts of technology on individuals, communities and societies. Eric Olson is the senior product marketing manager responsible for the Arcules VSaaS platform.
With wide-ranging experience in many industries, including video surveillance, Eric has an extensive background in B2B products. Thank you both for joining us for the conversation. ALEX: Appreciate being here. ERIC: Thanks, Keith. KEITH: Let's take a look at some of these statistics on the screen that show a snapshot of the physical security landscape in today's market.
We've got some hefty numbers up here. Alex, what do these numbers mean to you? ALEX: Yeah, when I look at these numbers that so many companies are experiencing a rise in physical security threats, but they have labor shortages and problems finding the right personnel and training them. When I see these numbers, what pops out at me is having to do more with less, which so many of us have that feeling, right? But, it's really becoming acute in physical security and IT operations. So, it just pops up to me.
How do we do more with less? And, how can Milestone help with that? KEITH: Eric, what do you think? ERIC: Yeah, when I see those stats, it really tells me that you know the security threats, they just keep growing. They keep getting more complex and the security teams struggle to keep up with the resources. And you know, in reaction to that, I think businesses are realizing that they need to do something new to keep up with those threats. And, one of those ways is going to a VSaaS solution.
KEITH: These challenges for businesses are evident. Let's take a closer look at some of the security and system challenges being faced by today's organizations. Alex, what can businesses do about the complexity of systems and limited IT resources? ALEX: Yeah, when we talk to customers today, one of the biggest challenges from an IT standpoint and then also then it dovetails with their business and operations is having to move from being just value-enabling, over to being value-accelerating. How do they use these systems in new ways that the other departments hadn't thought of before? And then, actually value-creating.
How does an IT department become, not just a cost center that enables other departments, but actually creates value for the larger organization's mission. So, that's what IT departments we're seeing need, and that's what they're talking to us about. How can we be value-accelerating and value-creating while we've just been in value-enabling mode, and we're just trying to maintain and deploy these systems.
We need to do something more. So, that is a huge aspect. How can they impact that? Now then, when you talk on the physical security side of things, they've always been about value protection, right? Less about value-enabling even and just value protection, which is hugely important, right? The safety and security of the people and assets, that's incredibly important.
But, in order to do more with less, they are also trying to find ways to be more value-enabling and then even value-creating. So, security departments are also looking at ways to be able to do that. KEITH: Eric, what do you think? ERIC: Yeah, I think, surveillance data is obviously important to all these stakeholders when they're meeting their challenges, and especially when it comes to security and safety folks. But, I think we're really starting to see that trend where business and ops folks are looking for ways to use this data to make their business more efficient and more profitable. You know, given the fact that we have these resources problems. And, I think it makes a lot of sense too.
You know, video is one of the biggest data pipes that's available to us. And with these rapid trends in cloud and AI, users can actually pull useful information out of that data now. And, it's not just security information, but it's information that is valuable for the entire organization, including biz and ops. So, when they see those challenges they're really looking to that data to help them solve problems and to make their business better.
KEITH: So, how can cloud-based video surveillance help? Alex, do you have any solutions for us? Cloud-based systems can help with all the deployment, the maintenance, the use of the system, making that much easier. Take that load off of the IT team. Take that load off the security team, so they can focus on the actual business results.
That's a huge piece itself. It's one of the core value props of cloud system, right? So, we are a cloud-delivered solution when we're talking about the Arcules product. So, we can deliver the maintenance of the system, the ease of the operation of the system, the maintenance of the system, we can handle all of that - offload that - so you can focus on your business results. So, that's the one piece. The other piece is on the the pure value creation part is getting your data ready for an AI future.
KEITH: Eric, can you give us a look into some of the markets segments and organizations that are having success with cloud? ERIC: You know, if we look at the type of customers that are being drawn to cloud, we find that it's a great choice for medium to enterprise-sized businesses that have less complex security needs. You know, they're the people that want set-it-and-forget-it systems. They want it to be powerful. They want it to be reliable, but they just want it to work. And then, also we've seen the businesses that have multiple physical locations find that cloud works very well.
You know, they want to be able to access all their sites with the same central interface, and often they want to access it from just one physical location as well. And, that's something that's very easily done with cloud. And then, along those same lines, there's also businesses we've seen that either have temporary sites that they set up and take down like a construction-type business. Or, it might be a business that sees a lot of acquisitions, where they acquire an entirely new business or they may acquire a physical piece of property that has a completely different VMS and they find that the cloud brings them a lot of flexibility to be able to ramp up those new sites and those new locations. It's just very easy and very attractive to do that. KEITH: Alex, can you take us through a few examples of business types that might find VSaaS helpful? ALEX: Yeah, you know, jumping off from Eric's point there.
We see the customers that are having the great conversations with us that we're able to solve their problems with Arcules VSaaS, are customers that need professional results. So, they have a strong expectation. It's not just a checkbox for them. They want a professional solution, but they need it to be simple.
They need an ease of experience overall. And that's the huge part, that ease of experience is what helps them unlock value. So, a perfect example is education. In the US, especially the K-12 market. The school districts that we work with have professional needs for video surveillance and security, right? It's critically important. But, the people using the systems are not undergoing days of training.
They need to pick it up and use it quickly, whether it's in an emergency or whether it's just figuring out who started the fight that was going on. That's really important, but it's a very small part of a vice principal's job to be looking at the video surveillance system. So, they need it to work very quickly. They need to be able to understand it and get results from it quickly. It's really important, but it needs to be fast and easy.
Another quick note on Eric's point is customers that have a lot of sites where security is not the primary job of a certain person. So, they have locations where it's important to have a system, but security is not someone's full-time job. So, whether it's a self-storage location, whether it's service retail, like a gym or a health center, retail, fast food - different places where someone really needs to be able to look at that video, but there is no security person accessing it all the time, or that is a highly-trained person. So, those kind of places is really where we see we're solving problems with Arcules. So up to this point, we've talked about challenges in the market and how cloud-based solutions can help. We've used the term video surveillance as a service in this discussion.
Now most people are very familiar with SaaS, software as a service. And, now they want a subscription-based service for video surveillance. Being a subscription service model, VSaaS is different from a traditional video management software. Eric, can you give us an overview of some of the different architectures that are out there and how they differ? ERIC: Yep, absolutely. And when we talk about cloud and we talk about these different use cases, it's important to kind of step back and understand the different ways that cloud deploys because it makes a difference in how you want to roll it out for your system. And so, the Arcules solution has three different deployment options and all three are what we would call cloud-managed.
Meaning that everything is managed, everything is configured from the cloud, and the user experience is always delivered through the cloud. And, the architecture's really differ in where the video is stored. And, that can help a lot to reduce, we talked about bandwidth, it can help you manage your cloud storage costs or just meet certain requirements you have with your business or a specific site. And so, really part of that difference lies in what we call a gateway.
And, the gateway is just a small little internet appliance that keeps things simple and connected. It connects all your devices together, it can store video and then it kind of does the communication back and forth to the cloud. And so, if we look at these three architectures and we start with the one on the left here, the cloud gateway architecture uses that gateway mainly as a means to buffer video on the way to the cloud. And, this is a great option where bandwidth is not an issue. You've got lots of flexibility on how you want to store the video, and you can easily send it up and down to the cloud. In the center one, what we call the edge gateway scenario.
This is where the user gets the exact same cloud experience in terms of viewing video and reacting to alarm. That's all the same. But, the video is stored locally on the gateway. And in this case, this option works well for locations where bandwidth may be an issue because you're not pushing all the data to the cloud all the time, you're only pushing the data that you need. And then finally, on the far right, there is our camera-to-cloud deployment. And in this solution, there's no gateway needed at all.
And so the video is actually stored on the camera's SD card. And, this solution is perfect for those locations where you want that minimal hardware footprint, whether that's actually space or if it's maintenance, it's clean, it's simple. And you know, obviously there's no gateway there to maintain. The trade offs are that storage is more limited because you're using an SD card. And, currently this solution for us that only works on the Axis cameras. The other great part is when you when you look across these three options, you can mix and match between all three of these deployment types.
You can do that by location or even within the same location. So, there's lots of flexibility based on the specifics of your business and your site. KEITH: You know, you even have some options here with whether you reuse existing cameras, or let's say you have a greenfield project where you're picking up new cameras for the project. Going with camera-to-cloud might be opening up your deployment choices, right? ERIC: Yep, that's correct. And so, and that's the flexibility with choices. In a camera-to-cloud, you may already have an Axis camera and you can use that camera-to-cloud.
In other cases you may already have a suite of other cameras and you would go with a cloud or an edge-type gateway to meet that need. KEITH: When customers need flexibility in their architecture, what should they consider? ERIC: So, with a cloud system, a cloud VMS, it's very easy to scale up and down. And, that's in terms of adding and removing cameras or even changing your video storage for a week, for a year, for whatever.
You can keep your existing cameras and so, in one case, it's financially, that's great for you. In the other cases, you've got an older camera and maybe it doesn't do the stuff you want to do, but adding it into a cloud, you can actually increase its performance by using the AI capabilities of the cloud systems. We talked about being able to manage across multiple sites. That's a biggie for cloud. And then, I think the other thing that we'll talk about a lot is, the neat part about open cloud systems is that they, they make for very easy integrations with other cloud systems. So, things like access control, central monitoring and IoT sensors.
It really gives you that flexibility to team with other great technology providers out there in the market. KEITH: So many people may still be asking themselves, which type of system makes the most sense to me, a cloud-based VSaaS, or a video management software? Alex, what do you think about that? ALEX: Yeah, I mean I think what's really kind of awesome at Milestone is that we can figure out what the best solution is for you or for your customers, right? For many customers that is a cloud VSaaS, a cloud-delivered system where they need something professional, but the offloading, the maintenance and operation deployment to the system onto the service provider - for us, that is extremely valuable, right? But, then we've got a whole lot of customers that a video management software is what they really need, because they need something that has more operational sort of detail, maybe complexity, because of the kind of problems that they have. They have different kinds of networking requirements, they have different sort of security requirements.
Some of these systems are air-gapped. There's a million different reasons that you can need to use a VMS, and we have that in XProtect. So, that' s typically when a customer has IT resources onsite, however they're supplied, but they can handle those onsite. And, the value that they're getting out of a VMS system is more important than relieving some of those infrastructure needs, right? Those operational needs.
So, it's okay. They have the expertise to be able to do their own updates and handle them, and handle a more complex network infrastructure. So, we've got both of those systems there. Whether it's XProtect on the VMS side, whether it's Arcules on the cloud-delivered VSaaS side. We've got both of those products that fit different customers. KEITH: I think it's important that we understand you don't have to choose one or the other.
What are our choices here? ALEX: Yeah, so I just like separated it out and then in fact, many customers say "Yes! Please!" when we we start talking to them, right? They want all of those different aspects, but oftentimes they need them at different physical locations. And, that is the huge difference, and something that we can solve for really well. A two-product solution is what we're hearing customers really need out in the market when they have physical locations that have complex or different needs. So, they have some sites that have IT resources. They can maintain those systems.
They have dedicated security officers. They may have a SOC, like a security operations center. They have those sort of deeper needs. They have deeper integration needs to other sort of subsystems.
They can handle a dedicated security workflow, right? Those sites are great for XProtect, but then they're telling us, but we've got all these other locations where it's the inverse. We don't have IT resources that are local on site. We don't have dedicated security people. The people that are using the system there need it to pretty much plug-and-play.
We need a professional standardized system, but we need it to get results immediately from relatively untrained people. And then, that's where the perfect fit for a cloud-delivered solution, like Arcules that prioritizes the ease of experience. But, it's all the same customer, right? So, they want to bring both of these systems together. And, a two-product solution with Xprotect and Arcules - what we call hybrid - That's where it really fits. So, the example that I like to give here, there's many different use cases that we're hearing, but one of the classic ones is, think of a corporate headquarters. It's got thousands of cameras, dedicated security officers, a SOC - security operation center, or a G-SOC - a global one.
And, they have heavy use of the system. It works great for XProtect, right? They're using the XProtect Smart Client and viewing cameras maybe all the time and events. Then they've got other sites that also have really heavy needs. Maybe they have a data center on-site, they've got IT resources, they're doing other things, other sites that are great for XProtect, but then maybe distribution sites, different things. But, then they've got sometimes the customer-facing places or the branch offices, whether it's retail stores or a branch location or something. They've got those sites, they don't have dedicated security, they've got an operations manager or the head of the office that is looking at the system, and then that's a perfect thing to put Arcules in.
So, it's easy to use, they can pick it up, it's easy to deploy. IT doesn't need to be local on site. You know, we handle, as a service provider, so many of those aspects, right? So, you have both of these. But, going back to that central corporate headquarters where that security operations center is. They want to have access to the system at those local sites. Oftentimes, it's only occasional, it's when an event occurs, when there's an analytics trigger, someone's loitering outside the building at 3:00 AM or something.
But, they need to be able to have access to that video, live video, playback video, the alarms that come in. And, that's why you have this hybrid environment all connected together. So, you're bringing those Arcules sites at those local locations into the larger location, viewing those, you could view them anywhere.
You could use the XProtect Smart Client anywhere to view that video, but generally we see it like in a centralized location like that. KEITH: So, let's go back to our table here. If we add a third column for hybrid, how does that compare? What I see there on the hybrid column is a lot of like mixed in "site specific," because as I talked about, you have these different kinds of sites with different kind of needs. And so, you decide which product makes more sense at those locations. So, when it's ease of experience and ease of use is extremely important, then you probably lean towards Arcules at those sites. If it's integration to a specific business system, or having a lot of the more complex in-depth things in the client that we've seen our customers need, then you go Arcules.
It's so much about the flexibility there. So, it depends, and we can solve for all of those. The one piece that I want to note there, that's universal there, is "open," right? Both systems are an open platform, an open system approach. So, you can bring in your existing cameras. We want to make those cameras better. We can bring in open devices, like Eric talked about: IoT sensors, environmental sensors, audio devices.
We bring in any of those in an open approach, which is so critical to an organization's future. KEITH: One thing I notice when I look at this table is the business model. Eric, can you help explain how capital expenditures and operational budgets come into play? ERIC: Yeah, so in the security world, we're always used to CapEx, right? You save up, you make a big expenditure, you plan for it.
And, it's a big capital expenditure system. But, in other markets in the world, they've moved to this service-based model. And, the service-based model reduces that need to make that big capital expenditure and it allows you to go into an OpEx. And, that gives a lot of financial flexibility.
So, in the case of VSaaS, although you can still choose to buy it as a CapEx if you want, you've got that flexibility to do that monthly type of operation expense versus one big capital expense. KEITH: So, now we get to the fun part. Let's take a quick look at the Arcules dashboard. Alex, can you demonstrate some of the highlights and product features for the Arcules product? ALEX: Yeah, let's look at something besides just our smiling faces, right? So, this is just going to be a very quick overview of some of the features and functionality of Arcules, our VSaaS product. For a fuller demo, engage with us, we to really dig into what the system can do and understand your specific needs and kind of tailor to that. So, I'm just going to show you a few things that our customers tell us they really find valuable or that they've really keyed in on that we've learned from them as an important part of the Arcules experience.
Customers so often tell us that because they're not those 24-7 security guards, their use of the system is oftentimes based on mobile. They're not looking at live video often, they're not looking at other other aspects of the system. They're getting a notification and they're going to want to react to it. We can go in, we can look at all the views that we've created here.
I'll scroll down and look at our offices in Mexico City. I've see I've got those cameras there. I can click on those, access those, pop that video up, look at it live anything that I need to do, live or playback video, get those notifications.
So, all of that right at your fingertips. So, one of the things that really stood out to me when I started at Arcules: When we're looking at the interface, we're not starting you on the views. We're not starting you with, you know, big wall tiles of live video cameras coming at you. Our typical customer isn't doing that, as I've said. So, our start is to look at your dashboard. And, this is
a customizable dashboard of different aspects of the system that you want to see. So, in this case, I've got this set up where I've got a health summary, I've got my different locations, I see the status of those. I've got a couple cameras offline that I probably want to take a look at. I can dive into those different locations and see information about them.
I've got my notifications like I just showed you on the mobile, but here's a bunch of status information and business intelligence that I have right on my dashboard. Here, for example, I've got people counting at one of our front entrances to our office here in Oregon - when different people were in our coffee bar, and I can even see that as a heat map showing what areas they were at most commonly right there at my fingertips. Here, I've got line crossing about who came into this specific area and how often they were coming in at different times of day. And, even seeing that there's different people at different hours, even down to the point of having parked vehicle counts. So, any of our analytics can be brought through and be shown as these kind of widgets.
So here, I've got our offices in Singapore, Mexico City, and Australia. That kind of business intelligence is oftentimes what our customers are saying, they use on the system day-to-day, right? They get that information day-to-day. Reacting to events is less often. They’re often critical, but they're looking at this as their kind of daily custom dashboard. So, and you can customize those dashboards.
You can have dashboards for different use cases, for different people, for different locations. You've got all of that at your fingertips. So, let's take a look at our notifications here. So, just kind of have an example here. I've got someone entering our records area, and you can see that I've got my person here coming through the video.
Let's just zoom in a little bit here. I can see, I can play that video back. See, I've got that detection. This was a crossed line into that area in the field of view. You see I've got my color-coded timeline, just like on the mobile here.
I can see that there's different color codes for just motion detection, people detection, if there's any video recorded there, whether you're recording continuously or on motion. I can go into a forensic search right here when I click on it. So, I can see just from that two minutes, okay, this was my detections of right in that period of time from that camera. But, let's pull it back a bit. Let's go back to the last two hours.
And, I can see that from a long period of time. I've got my cameras here. I can take a look. I'm doing people detection here. Let's say that I want to find only when there is someone with a black shirt on.
I can do that specifically. I can do different colors, so you're able to do those kind of searches. Search color, search on people, we can search on, you know, we can cancel that and just search on vehicles in this camera.
Well, okay, we actually did find a vehicle. Look at that. Who's that suave man riding a bike awkwardly in an office? So, you're able to do those kind of searches, find things that you maybe wouldn't have expected, right? So, we can call up that video and see that, okay, we do have a vehicle in here, there's a bike coming by. And, actually do have...
I scroll in there and I do see I've got my color-coded timeline that I just pulled up and it was, I could see it in green. So, let's say that I do find the incident, this seems a little shady - needs to be investigated and I'm going to export that video out. We want to make that really, really easy. You find the video you want, you export it out and that is going to upload to our cloud as a case. And, I'm going to go over to my case here.
So, that's going to be part of my case here. It's in the cloud, it's completely free to add these, this video outside. Its normal retention time.
Maybe you're recording this video for 30 days. Keep this video, that's part of an evidence case as long as you need to within our cloud you can share that video with anyone that you want to, that has rights to the system. Of course, we want to make sure that it's protected, but that video will stay with you as long as you need to. So, I'm going to take a look at that video anytime that I want.
I can call it up, but I've got that export in a case in the cloud. Call that up from anywhere in the world and be able to share that video. And, I can have multiple pieces of evidence within this one case. But if you have additional questions, how can we make that easy so that you're not having your day interrupted by having to do a big support call or figure out something and it could take a long time. Well, we've got embedded chat. So, we think that's an extremely important part of our experience and extremely part, important part of the idea of a product as a service.
Video surveillance as a service means that you have technical support, technical assistance, right there at your fingertips. So, inside the product itself we have embedded chat support. So, you can take a look at all of our knowledge bases are available right here within the product. I can go ahead and search, let's say I want to know a little bit more about cases. I can go ahead and put that in.
I can click on cases here, can call up that information - research all about cases, managing them, exporting them. I've got all that info there right at my fingertips. But again, let's say that okay, it doesn't quite cover my use case or I'm a little unconfident, not confident about what to do. You can contact a live human being within the product itself. So, you can go to messages, you can send a message to our team - live real human being. I can say something like, "Are my cases secure?" And, I can ask some more difficult question there.
Something that I might have. I can send that there. One of our customer care personnel is there reading those questions, able to respond to you.
They might ask you, you can look at some different, different knowledge bases while you're getting a response. But, I can come in there... Earlier today, one of our customer care representatives, Meg was helping me with a question like this that I had about a case. And, you can walk right through there. And again, that's a key part of what we consider to be a product as a service. It's a whole solution here.
And, part of that is our embedded chat support that you have available to you. So again, those were just a few quick highlights that we wanted to show you, how we find incidents quickly, how we can search your video quickly, how we can get the help that we need as soon as we need it. KEITH: Thanks Alex for the demo. I think that wraps up most of the questions business leaders have about cloud-delivered video surveillance. We could go on and on, but we won't, we promised you we get out of here in an hour and we're at the top of the hour.
You can also pick up the recording of this webinar on our website, under the resources. You can book a demo with one of your local representatives. We'll provide you with a link right here at the end of this webinar. And, we'd love to hear from you. Thanks for taking time to join us today and we certainly appreciate you.
Thanks.
2025-04-15 01:51
