Thought Exercise: Remote Client Application

You could use an edge technology where the SD Card becomes your onsite storage. I think most VMS manufacturers have varying degrees of support for SD cards in cameras.

You would not need cloud, but rather locate your "VMS" in a location with sufficient bandwidth for the maximum amount of live or playback streams you need at one time. Of course this could be an AWS or Azure instance, or a server in a data center, or in your own main office.

Specifically with Milestone you can use what's called SQVR (Scalable Quality Video Recording) which means you record high-res video (or whatever you want) directly onto the SD card, and then you configure a low-res (or whatever you want) stream that will be sent to your centralized "recorder".

When you are playing back the low-res video, you can highlight the timeline and make a request to pull the high-res video down as needed.

I think this would be good for a situation where you don't want a box on-site, and it also conserves bandwidth back to the centralized server. 

Milestone Employee

I am not for certain but I do know Genetec has a cloud offering for VMS they call it Genetec Stratocast.  It may be worth looking into but I am not sure how it would look as far as architecture on site nor am I aware of the costs.

*Hanwha Employee*

Camcloud can record to the cloud from various Hanwha cameras.

Camcloud runs as an app on the Hanwha camera.  You use your mobile phone to discover and configure the camera, send the app to the camera, etc.

Cheap, easy and functional can be a difficult trio to hit, but that also depends on what your budget is, how easy do you need the system to work, and what function does the system need to perform.

A few questions first:

If they already have cameras and access control for each site, what is the operational purpose of these 1 or 2 cameras? Do you need continuous recording, event recording, time of day limited recording? Are these to watch entrances, lobbies, dumpsters, driveways?

You are correct that Avigilon Blue, Eagle Eye, Arcules, OpenEye (among others) require an on-site appliance. The advantage to this type of architecture is generally 2-fold: the gateway or NVR provides the secure tunnel through any firewalls and over the Internet to cloud services, generally removing the requirement for port forwarding or complicated network configuration. Also, the on-site appliance typically offers some video buffering on site in the event of an Internet outage. A couple of disadvantages are having an extra piece of equipment on site (cost, management, location, power, etc), an additional single point of failure.

The camera only, direct to cloud solutions like Stratocast, Axis AVHS-powered solutions, Axis Guardian (also among others) generally also can record to an SD card within the camera, in addition to the cloud. Configuration can be more complex because each camera has to be registered and connected to cloud services, compared to one NVR/Gateway, but this complexity will vary depending on the service. 

There are also a couple of systems that provide camera hardware only with primary storage on camera using large SSD/Flash drives, and cloud as a backup from Verkada Cloud VMS/Cameras Tested and Cisco Meraki Cloud VMS/Cameras Tested. However, neither of these would generally be considered low cost, they both offer basic video analytics which performance was mixed depending on the scene lighting. Depending on your use case, they can be considered easy to use, but both are also limited to just a handful of proprietary camera options as well.

We have a listing of Directory of VSaaS / Cloud Video Surveillance Providers which lists out 20+ vendors that offer a mix of direct-to-cloud storage and onsite storage with cloud backup, with or without onsite NVR/gateway hardware.

Hi, I'm from Ivideon VSaaS team, and I think that our solution is suitable for your needs. 

There are cameras with custom FW which allows them to work with Ivideon cloud (live, archive), simple setup via web-interface or mobile app. So all you need on-site is: camera, internet access and power.

Hey everyone, 

Thank you for the great replies. I am going to go through and respond to your ideas. This has been a great help, for sure. 

I wanted to thank everyone for their input on this a while back. After talking to my integrator, and what we want to try to accomplish (using this as an internal QA program for our other security personel in client locations across the country) I am going to try a pilot using the Axis camera and software solution, with SD edge recording.

Does anyone have a suggestion for the size of the SD card needed? I won't need to record with high resolution, and I would like to have at least a few days stored provided we don't run into the Axis storage failure issues that have been mentioned elsewhere.