We are taking over a clients network and are in the process of switching over their firewalls and in a few locations changing ISP's. We found that all of their Hikvision NVR's are using HiDDNS for remote access. Since it's a discontinued product we are looking at moving the NVR's to Hik-Connect or another DDNS service.
What do you recommend? Is Hik-Connect secure and easily managed?
#1, good question.
Structurally, you have 3 options:
The most secure is VPNs, see Remote Network Access for Video Surveillance Guide for discussion and contrast of all 3.
As for Hik-Connect, it has performance issues (e.g., Broken Hikvision App Exposes Hypocrisy) and it had a vulnerability uncovered in April (i.e., Hikvision Critical Cloud Vulnerability Disclosed). Because of the performance issues, they tend to recommend port forwarding anyway (which exposes the devices publicly to mass attacks as new vulnerabilities are uncovered).
On the other hand, VPNs require time and effort to setup and maintain on different client devices.
In sum, I hope this lays out some of the challenges across all options. Which one is best depends on the personal tradeoffs you want to accept.
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