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To better protect customers’ businesses, security professionals are entrusted to leverage new approaches and technologies to counter the latest threats. Yet many are hesitant to try emergent, less well-established solutions, instead favoring legacy methods and systems. By ignoring advancements, or at the very least putting them off, many security professionals are limiting themselves and their customers from reaping the benefits of current technologies.

They are also missing out on key opportunities to expand their service offerings and increase recurring monthly revenue through the adoption of cloud services and hosted software.

Aiming to align resources to maximize security, I thought it might be helpful to walk through a sample installation to show how easy and beneficial it can be to convert customers to a hosted video solution.

Standard needs
In this example, your customer is a modest, family-owned jewelry shop that has been in the local business community for 15 years. Until now, their security posture has primarily relied on a buzzed entry and thick bulletproof glass to fortify the shop. The bulletproof glass separates staff and merchandise from customers, enabling contact through transaction windows.

Three recent robberies in their strip mall have made the owners extremely concerned about their ability to secure the shop, and they have expressed a desire to improve security and upgrade to a contemporary surveillance system.

Your on-site survey reveals the following requirements: 1) the system must be easy to install and use without additional costs, equipment and maintenance; 2) they cannot afford significant software and hardware upgrades; 3) they want to monitor the shop after hours via remote video access. What do you recommend?

Solution found
This scenario seems ideal for a hosted video system. You recommend installing three networked cameras to capture video data, delivered to a 24/7 hosted video service.

Cameras: Using IP megapixel cameras, the deployment of an affordable and reliable hosted video surveillance solution is scalable, enabling new network cameras as the need arises. The network cameras stream live video with up to 1 megapixel resolution to a PC in the back of the store. During an event, users can activate an LED to illuminate the scene remotely, while using cameras to pan, tilt and zoom. Sensors on the camera provide motion detection, even in low light conditions.

Hosted Video: Combining the benefits of cloud storage technology, network attached storage and an integrated video management system, the HVSS enables your customer to access real-time and recorded surveillance video anytime and anywhere via a web-enabled device. The provider handles system maintenance and upgrades on the back-end, allowing for a full-featured, yet easy-to-use end-user system.

In the past, businesses have used elaborate and expensive DVR-based systems to store video data, but this model is showing its age in terms of cost, ease-of-use and technical capabilities. Savvy intruders know to find the DVR to destroy evidence.

External cloud-based storage platforms compare positively to DVRs and other internal storage platforms, allowing for backing up file copies in the cloud. The cloud-based hosted system eliminates the need for on-site DVRs, reducing security vulnerabilities with the video streamed and stored securely in an off-site data center.

An HVSS provides high performance, capacity and security, allowing the small business to recognize cost savings. A network attached storage device can work in tandem with the cloud storage service provider and IVMS, allowing users to record and store high-definition video locally while backing up a standard definition copy in the cloud for retention requirements and peace-of-mind.

Reducing the need for upfront capital investment, the HVSS’s small monthly operating expenses appeal to small businesses. As a hosted service, this model proves attractive to the integrator, offering RMR opportunities and further opportunities to entrench customer loyalty.

Security and confidence
Through a browser-based application, the owners have access to live video feeds from different areas of the store. The staff feels much safer with camera surveillance. When someone is working with a customer, other staff can keep an eye on them, simultaneously scanning other areas, too. The owners can log into the system to check on their business after hours.

Conclusion
By embracing today’s cloud-based tools and hosted service models, you can help your customers to more strategically align resources and maximize protection. Thanks to the affordability, ease of installation and management, a hosted video service is often the right solution for businesses of all sizes. Moving video surveillance data storage into hosted and cloud-based environments enables small business customers to recognize gains in efficiency, flexibility and scalability.

 Mike Nikzad is the chief operating officer of the Iomega Corporation, an EMC Company.  
 

We’re getting very excited here about our upcoming TechSec conference, which will be held in Fort Lauderdale in February. It’s the ninth year of the popular event, and if we do say so ourselves, it keeps getting better and better. 

Keynotes this year will be Lauren Stover, security director at Miami International Airport, along with Ray Davalos, MIA’s building systems director. There’s no better match for the conference, sponsored by Security Director News and Security Systems News. MIA’s nationally acclaimed behavioral recognition program will be among the topics Stover and Davalos will discuss.

I’ll write more about this later, but for now I’d just like to say that this year’s crop of SDN’s 20 under 40 winners, who will be honored at TechSec, is amazing. I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with them over the past weeks, and I’m so impressed by their intelligence and commitment to the industry. Four of our honorees will be on one of our panels, Next Gen Security: Young security professionals talk tech.

Please check out the website and plan to attend TechSec. I’d really like to meet you.

Usually on Fridays I like to take a lighter note on this blog. This morning, as a matter of fact, I made a note to myself to blog about some mine-sniffing U.S. Navy dolphins that are being reassigned to port security duties.

But events of the day have taken their toll.

We here at Security Director News are saddened and sickened by the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Innocent children? Public educators?

As a mother, I cannot for a second begin to imagine the depths of agony the victims' parents are going through.

As someone who keeps a close watch on the security industry, my heart goes out to the first responders and those responsible for securing the scene and dealing with the aftermath.

Many questions remain to be answered, but for now, our heartfelt thoughts and prayers go out to the folks in Newtown.

A number of retail-related security surveys have been finding their way into my inbox during this busy shopping season, and some overlap. The Retail Equation recently came out with a report on fraudulent loss at the returns counter——and what to be on the lookout for—and the National Retail Federation has just released a similar survey. 

The Retail Equation, in fact, was a partner with the NRF on the survey, said Rich Mellor, NRF’s executive vice president for loss prevention. The consistency of the  findings, he said, reinforces the studies’ numbers and information.

The NRF says the industry will lose an estimated $8.9 billion to return fraud this year, and $2.88 billion during the holiday season alone. Overall, retailers estimate 4.6 percent of holiday returns are fraudulent. The survey found that 96.5 percent of retailers polled say they’ve had stolen merchandise returned in the past year, and 84.2 percent said they’ve experienced the return of merchandise purchased on fraudulent or stolen tender.

Still, Mellor told me, as retailers get more tech-savvy in the area of return fraud, the outlook is looking better, Mellor said.

“There is evidence that some of the different, sophisticated systems and checks and balances they have put in, both to track employees in collusion with outsiders and with customers, has gotten much better over the years,” he said. “It’s not an exact science, but information received from technology is so powerful.”

E-receipts that, through coding, allow only one return to be made per receipt to helps in the counterfeit receipt area, he said, and are the wave of the future.