End users who want to leverage the best of both on-prem and cloud solutions can benefit from the hybrid cloud video. This is especially the case for end users in certain vertical markets.
Video surveillance end users who want to leverage the
best of both on-prem and cloud solutions can benefit from the hybrid cloud model. This is especially the case for end users in certain vertical markets, for example retail, healthcare and critical infrastructure.
Hybrid cloud solutions for video surveillance, in which video footage is distributed across onsite and cloud storage, can generally benefit end users who have:
Large number of cameras: The camera count can be a deciding factor in determining whether to get pure or hybrid cloud. “Pure cloud can be useful if you have a small number of cameras, and the cameras are from a single vendor to limit the cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Residential video systems tend to be pure cloud,” said Tom Buckley, Co-Founder of Qumulex. “For commercial systems with a larger number of cameras of various types and resolutions, plus variable storage retention times, a hybrid cloud system gives you the best of both worlds: inexpensive local storage with low-latency networks, plus the benefits of the cloud in anywhere-accessibility.”
Bandwidth constraints: Entities with bandwidth constraints can also find helpful hybrid cloud in which only certain videos are transmitted to the cloud. “Really any customer who wants the benefits of the cloud, but has operational budgetary constraints or bandwidth limitations (can benefit from hybrid cloud),” said Dean Drako, Founder and CEO of Eagle Eye Networks. “If a system is so big that the amount of data being generated at a single site cannot be transmitted to the cloud given the amount of bandwidth they have, a hybrid system would be a good alternative to increasing their network speeds with the ISP.”
Onsite storage requirements: For entities who are required to store certain data onsite for security or privacy reasons, hybrid cloud can be beneficial. “The requirement to buy hardware or a special camera to benefit from the cloud offering essentially means that the easiest-to-approach customers are those who are currently using local VMS or NVRs for video monitoring. Usually such customers have a specific requirement to store data locally but still want to benefit from cloud services – offsite storage, notifications, web UI and clip sharing,” said Viachaslau Hrytsevich, CEO of
3dEYE.
That said, from a vertical market perspective, the following verticals can especially benefit from hybrid cloud solutions.
Retail
Hybrid cloud solutions can be helpful for
retailers. “From a vertical-specific standpoint, hybrid cloud video systems is particularly useful for retail. It enables regional or HQ visibility into exception reporting, yet enables the local storage of most video, saving the typically limited bandwidth in retail locations for more valuable payment traffic,” Buckley said.
Military
As mentioned, end user entities that have cloud migration plans but must keep certain information onsite can benefit from hybrid. The US Army, for example, began a hybrid cloud pilot program at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. According to the Army website, the hybrid architecture can include a combination of on-premises Department of Defense cloud environments, commercial cloud service providers and off-premises federal cloud environments.
Healthcare
Healthcare providers can also benefit from hybrid cloud as certain video data concerning patients must be kept on-premises. Further, amid covid-19 where many hospitals have set up temporary patient units that need to be secured with video surveillance, hybrid solutions can also help.
To sum up, gauging the benefit of hybrid architecture for any operation requires the need to look at the specific business problems that such a deployment aims to solve. “A single university campus, with a robust fiber network and data center of its own may only require the cloud for low definition archival storage. A different category of business problems can be solved by hybrid cloud for a large-scale financial intuition that is mandated to manage its own private cloud,” said Laurent Villeneuve, Product Marketing Manager at Genetec.