FAILSAFE?
Be it landline or mobile, no network connections are perfect 100 percent of the time, which could be a reason to the seemingly slow uptake of MVaaS offerings in most parts of the world. "There are no assurances, which is a huge issue," Shepherd said. "Other issues include a lack of sufficient bandwidth to port video over networks, not having the video stored on mission-critical servers, and losing video when there is any power interruption." Protection One has seen large national accounts, especially in retail, with very little bandwidth at their locations. "The Internet connections are often sized solely for the purpose of uploading PoS data at night, not for transporting video on demand. Increasing bandwidth at thousands of locations is a huge expense," cautioned Douglas Paul, VP of Operations and Corporate Services.
On the other hand, many others feel the fear of service disruptions on IP networks is greatly exaggerated. "For example, how many times do you find that Google or your bank's website is down? The Internet was designed specifically to be ‘self-healing' or able to withstand disruptions," Edulbehram explained. "That means when one part of the network is affected, other parts make up for the disruption. Traditional security integrators need to be knowledgeable about the inherent best practices of robust network design." Mill agreed, adding that SAS 70-
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| ▲ Jim Shepherd, National Account Manager for Retail, Protection One |
compliant data centers today guarantee portal uptime by using redundant power sources, multiple network carriers providing reliability and performance, on-site staff to monitor and provide assistance, managed firewall and data backup services, flood-proofed raised floors, advanced canopy cold-row cooling, smoke detection systems, 24/7 security and digital video surveillance.
Most commercial-grade MVaaS solutions today use a hybrid of local and hosted storage, Lohse added. "They incorporate SD cards or local NAS drives to supplement the cloud infrastructure, which allows them to mitigate bandwidth concerns and provide redundancy in the event of a network failure. Furthermore, many MVaaS applications are constantly monitoring for connectivity and send out an alert to users if an outage is detected, so it can be addressed immediately."
Security communication to central monitoring stations can include cellular backup; thus, when the power and broadband service are out, emergency backup battery and cellular services initiate, keeping a constant level of communication to central stations, Roberts said. "This is critical to ensure the peace-of-mind value proposition that home security delivers, and features that solution providers like us offer."
For Envysion, much like the Internet a decade ago and software-as-a-service applications (SaaS, such as salesforce.com) a few years ago, questions of MVaaS uptime and redundancy are largely a thing of the past. "Internet connectivity and reliability continue to improve, and many enterprises have redundant or backup IP. In addition, MVaaS solutions can be designed and deployed to work ‘locally' if the Internet does go down," Steinfort said. Customers' video can actually reside both on the on-site DVR and in the cloud. The video remains on the DVR until the hard drive is full (typically 30 to 60 days depending on camera configurations and the drive size).
The Web-based application, through which users backup footage, review video and export reports, resides in the cloud. When customers log into the portal to view live or recorded video, the application streams the video content on demand from the DVR at the site.
An added advantage of managed video over traditional security is that many providers have system health monitoring in place and can immediately alert customers if a camera or DVR goes down, whereas traditional cameras could be down months before anyone knew.