Enterprise storage vendor Synology has come up with a cloud-native video surveillance service, called C2 Surveillance, that lets organisations large and small monitor their premises and save the footage on the cloud easily.
The server-less offering makes use of easy-to-deploy cameras and enables anyone from government organisations to small businesses to get started with video surveillance quickly.
While traditional surveillance for businesses usually stores videos on-premise, Synology’s C2 Surveillance works like a consumer-friendly cloud-based service that sends videos to the cloud instantly. At the same time, it promises to bring powerful enterprise tools and security settings.
This means that the video footage will be available even after a critical incident, like a fire or theft at a warehouse, where a typical network video recorder may be damaged or stolen.
The C2 Surveillance offering supports Synology’s cameras – either in bullet, turrent or other formats – and can be used in multiple sites. This way, a retailer can monitor multiple stores all at once, for example.
At a media event at the Computex show at Taipei this week, Synology executives said the service can host up to 30,000 cameras. The information is presented on a customisable dashboard that shows where an alert has come up on a city map.
Each camera can even be mapped on a building’s floor plan, should there be multiple cameras at one site. To investigate, a security staff member simply clicks on an alert, say, of an unexpected person detected at a site.
As you may expect, Synology’s system also makes use of AI to help users easily find what they are looking for. Search for a Tesla Model 3 in red, for example, and the system can show you videos where one appears. This saves time combing through footage by timestamp.
The AI is even smart enough to trigger something you may not initially search for. A phrase like “a man with a gun” could pop up in the search box to show you something that may be important and that you’d have missed.
Of course, security is important for such cameras. So, data is encrypted and there are granular permission settings – you can allow a branch manager to only access footage from their outlet, for example.
And what if the Internet goes down at a site? Will the footage still be recorded? Synology says that the video is first stored on a camera’s SDcard – Synology-branded ones only, please – before it is backed up to its C2 Cloud service.
Plus, if the Internet goes down, an offline mode automatically switches to a local network link so you can still use your phone or PC to connect to the cameras and see the footage on your local network (assuming you are on-site).
For folks who are worried about the amount of bandwidth the service uses, Synology’s C2 Surveillance supports low bandwidth as well. This means cutting down video quality by 50 per cent if you don’t have a fast broadband connection in the office.
What’s less clear is how much the cloud offering will eventually cost, when the C2 Surveillance monitoring service becomes available later this year. Don’t forget video files are huge and storage on the cloud is not cheap.
As a rough comparison, another video surveillance camera maker, Arlo, offers 24/7 monitoring for consumers in the United States for US$24.99 a month.
That includes support for unlimited cameras, though the service is aimed more at home owners and small businesses than large enterprises.
Eventually, Synology folks have said there could be an option to back up the videos to a Synology network attached storage, so potentially you could lessen the load – and costs – on the cloud and have some older videos saved locally. Details of that are still pending.
