Credit Union Sold on Linux OS and Real-time Health Monitoring

Marine Federal Selects 8000 Series Hybrid NVRs

When senior management at Marine Federal Credit Union decided it was time to upgrade their video surveillance system, they looked to their trusted security systems supplier, Guardian Financial Systems for some recommendations.

Based in Jacksonville, North Carolina, Marine Federal operates 20 branches and 110 ATMs serving active duty and retired military, civil servants, and business affiliates on and around military bases in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia.

Richard Hardison, Assistant Vice-President of Information Systems, and Devin Costa, Information Systems Security Administrator, did some research on their own, but relied on Guardian Financial to steer them in the right direction.

After a thorough evaluation of the alternatives, “they recommended March Networks® as being the best solution for us,” recalled Hardison.

Like any financial institution, Marine Federal relies on video surveillance to protect the assets of its customers — or members in this case — and provide a safe, secure environment for all concerned. However, a security system itself needs to be secure, and the Windows-based system Marine Federal was relying on was anything but.

The vulnerability of their older video surveillance system to security breaches was a major concern for an organization whose members are primarily armed forces personnel and security experts themselves.

March Networks’ far more secure Linux-based operating system figured prominently in Marine Federal’s decision, but there were several other March Networks capabilities that appealed to the credit union’s Information Systems team.

Among them were March Networks’ Financial Transaction Integration capability, its health monitoring functionality and the company’s new 8000 Series hybrid NVRs, which allow customers like Marine Federal to migrate from all analog to all IP cameras when they’re ready.

The transition to March Networks technology began earlier this year with the acquisition of 8732 Hybrid NVRs for its headquarters in Jacksonville and several branches. At the same time, a half dozen ATMs were equipped with March Networks 3204 NVRs.

The powerful 8732 boasts recording capability of 30 frames per second (FPS) across 32 channels and offers onboard storage capacity of up to 12 TB. Going forward, said Erick Willis, of Guardian Financial, Marine Federal’s ATMs will be equipped with the recently unveiled 8704 NVR, which was specially designed to fit in space constrained locations.

Marine Federal hopes to take advantage of all the capabilities of March Networks technology by adding IP cameras and March Networks’ Financial Transaction Integration (FTI) software down the road.

“We see FTI as a big benefit because we’re spread out over three states and we have a lot of standalone ATMs,” said Hardison. “If we have someone who is scamming us, we can take the transaction information and go right to the video of the person. Our security and risk department will be able to do a much better job of investigating incidents of ATM fraud.”

And with IP cameras, Marine Federal’s investigator will have much sharper images to work with.

March Networks health monitoring functionality is another big plus.

“With our older technology, we have to rely on branch personnel to make sure the cameras are working and properly focused,” said Hardison. “But our branch personnel aren’t security people or IT people. They have their branch responsibilities to worry about.

With March Networks health monitoring capability, we’ll know about a defective hard drive or a camera issue without having to rely on our branch personnel. The system will automatically send us an email alert, allowing us to resolve an issue before it becomes a problem.”

Reliability and ease of maintenance are two additional advantages of March Networks technology.

“We have no redundancy with our older video surveillance system,” said Costa. “If a hard drive goes, that’s it. There’s no backup. But with the March Networks system, our drives are mirrored, so we don’t lose anything if one hard drive is defective.”

Currently, Marine Federal’s 8732s are equipped with two 2 TB drives for a total of four TB of storage. However, the full 12 TB capacity of the recorder can be taken advantage of as IP cameras are deployed.

Ease of installation and maintenance is made possible by March Networks’ unique docking station architecture, which allows a technician to swap out a recorder or replace a hard drive without having to disconnect all the camera cabling.

It’s a lot easier to budget for a new and much more advanced system using a phased approach, noted Hardison. “Upgrading all at once would be very challenging. When we went with March Networks, we knew there were a lot of possibilities for future enhancements. We may not be able to take advantage of all of them today, but knowing we can make the move to IP cameras and acquire FTI as funds become available was very important to us.”