When it comes down to it, every business needs reliable physical security measures in place. Whether your facility requires four or 4,000 cameras, the myriad threats to employees, customers, and assets alike create an unignorable need for video surveillance infrastructure. Addressing that need, however, doesn’t end with installing security cameras. Building a robust security system requires integrating high-performing, purpose-built hardware from the front to the back end. This includes top-of-the-line security cameras, but more importantly, it means impregnable video storage.
The Importance of Purpose-Built Video Storage
This holistic approach to video surveillance solution design applies to large and small deployments alike, as the importance of purpose-built video storage is relevant across the board. Without strategically designed storage architecture, surveillance deployments of all sizes cannot function properly. Without the right storage framework, security officers often experience latency and dropped frames from their video surveillance solutions. When video is lost, analytics do not perform, which hinders the delivery of real-time intelligence—on an even simpler level, if any video footage of an incident is corrupted, prosecution of a crime is immeasurably complicated.
Poor storage infrastructure design also causes security professionals to encounter high capital expenditures and operations expenses down the road, regardless of the size of their deployment, as anytime they need to add additional storage to support more 4K surveillance cameras, video analytic applications, or increased retention times, the inflexibility of traditional video storage servers would require they scale imprecisely, thereby wasting resources.
To mitigate these pain points, customers should avoid mistakes businesses owners often make when it comes to their video security and storage systems and rely instead on specially designed storage architecture, purpose-built for video.
What are those mistakes, you might ask? Find the most common three below:
Overlooking Scalability
The fact is, your business, along with technology, will continue to evolve. As global data creation, consumption, and circulation continues to skyrocket over the next decade, small businesses must invest in a storage architecture that achieves that delicate balance between scalability, performance, and ROI. In other words, don’t get stuck with data infrastructure that cannot keep up.
At BCD, we design our entry-level servers with scalability in mind. Built with Intel® Xeon® Gold and Silver processors at the core, each system delivers unparalleled scalability and performance for compute, storage, memory, network, and security. At the outset, whether your deployment needs 2TB or 96TB, BCD’s entry-level servers offer solutions for any small to mid-size deployment.
Making Short Term Investments
Data is critical to your small business. In a world where information is the most valuable resource, you’re going to want to store every gigabyte you generate. From your IT applications to your security system, it’s important to invest smart. Don’t sacrifice crucial data storage and accessibility to save costs—in the long run, the best place to be is ahead of the game.
Today that means investing in a hybrid cloud infrastructure. BCD’s Harmonize Bridge, powered by Tiger Technology, allows users to store data on-premises, as well as in private and public cloud platforms—a system design which is, again, endlessly customizable. Harmonize Bridge not only allows you to choose your preferred cloud provider, it also gives users the ability to seamlessly manage cloud storage and services, all while maintaining legacy applications and workflows. This means that integrators can continue to provide on-site hardware with the new, added capacity of cloud storage products that give customers more immediacy and flexibility than ever before.
All the major pain points associated with cloud servers are circumvented with BCD’s Harmonize Bridge, which is optimized to eliminate latency and deliver superior speed—essential for video footage accessibility—easily scalable and endlessly secure. In addition, because typical cloud servers present themselves as an SMB share, many storage gateway technologies are vulnerable to network intrusions. Harmonize Bridge runs directly from your server’s memory so that https encryption takes place before any critical data leaves your network, ensuring your data is safe.
Going at it Alone
What’s more important than anything else, whether it’s hardware or software questions—small business owners must rely on the experts. BCD partners with the world’s top security integrators, distributors, and technology partners to implement security solutions certified by the top video management software (VMS) and digital camera manufacturers. Our global footprint includes more than 170,000 systems recording over three million cameras in 91 countries—so you can trust us to know what we’re doing. But the size of our footprint doesn’t mean we don’t prioritize small-scale surveillance projects.
We have a heart for small businesses because those are the spaces where security matters most at the end of the day. Unfortunately, it’s the underfunded, outdated, and poorly designed security systems that suffer the most from the costs of perimeter breaches. For this reason, we design our entry-level products with these deployments in mind and make our customer support and product education resources readily available to keep our customers informed and satisfied.
We’re proud of our technologies. From the beginning, our aim was to become a pillar of the global security industry, as a positive market disrupter with leading-edge innovation. Through innovation and powerful partnerships, we aspire to provide secure solutions to those who need it most.