Managing Your Video Surveillance System is Easy with an Enterprise Solution

When considering options for video surveillance for a multisite organization, the choice of solutions can sometimes be daunting.

While many factors, including the size of your organization and the number of recorders you need, will play a role in your final decision, knowing the benefits of using a fully distributed enterprise management solution can help you make the right choice for your installation and ensure you get the scalability and manageability you need going forward.

Your Time is Valuable – Make the Most of It!

Enterprise solutions are built to reliably support video surveillance in large organizations that require hundreds – or even thousands – of cameras, recorders and video channels. They are ideal for multisite installations because they allow you to efficiently administer, maintain and manage your video surveillance system, saving you time.

Centralized system management is a key feature of enterprise solutions, and nowhere is this more advantageous than in the initial installation and configuration of your system.

The process of adding and naming all of your cameras, setting up alarms and triggers and configuring your network credentials can take hours. If you’re using standalone recorders and cameras, this process must be repeated for each location in your organization.

An enterprise solution, however, allows you to mass configure all your devices. You simply save your preferred configuration and then apply it to each of your recorders in one easy step, saving you time and labor costs.

Video Management Made Easy

The centralized control of an enterprise solution also makes the day-to-day operation and maintenance of your video surveillance system much easier.

Features like remote health monitoring allow one person to quickly scan the status of all your devices when they log in in the morning, making it faster and easier to identify problems.

When firmware updates are required, a centrally-managed system allows you to apply the updates simultaneously to all your devices, without having to log in to a separate device and push configurations one at a time.

Over time, this can add up to significant savings for an organization.

Customizable and User-Friendly

Accessing the information you need, quickly and easily, is important in any business; but it’s particularly crucial for an organization’s security department.

The customizable features of an enterprise solution allow for fast and easy access to just the right information so security officials can focus on monitoring key areas. Some businesses, for example, want to see camera views of all their backdoors to guard against employee theft. Retailers may want views of all their high-value merchandise shelves, so they can keep an eye on expensive items. Enterprise solutions allow you to create and save these views so you can quickly and easily access the images.

Because enterprise solutions offer multi-level user access privileges, managers can also control access to different information. For example, they can create broad, high-level permissions for senior managers, and more customized views for regional or onsite managers so they can only see the camera views associated with their store or group of stores.

As an added bonus, enterprise IP video solutions also come with built-in deployment and failover functionalities, like the ability to run in a virtualized environment using VMware. They also support LDAP services like Microsoft Active Directory users and user groups. This means you can use the same login and password for your security system that you do for your regular programs, and the corporate IT department can use its regular tool to control and prevent (when needed) user access to sensitive information.