The cloud has at times been seen as the solution to end everyone’s storage challenges. But adoption for surveillance has been hindered by technology and other concerns, such as stability, accessibility, integrity and security.

“There are different opinions about cloud-based recording,” says Tim Shen of Dahua USA. “Some support it because it can save more space in local devices and video can be accessed via the Internet. However, there are certain situations where either Internet is not available or in high-risk situations, organizations will rely on local storages rather than cloud-based recording.”

But like any new technology or practice, cloud-based recording has been slowly accepted into the video surveillance world as attitudes have evolved.

“People used to be afraid of the cloud; now they embrace it,” says IC Real Tech’s Matt Sailor. “I credit the acceptance of this to the big names such as Amazon who gave people the comfort level needed to use it for security purposes.”

Other industries’ adoption of cloud-based services have also helped overcome security concerns that have stood in the way of wider video surveillance use of the cloud.

“Cloud-based solutions are generally more accepted in today’s market due to the widespread applications of banking apps in the cloud, sales force.com, and security system applications now being pushed to the cloud,” says Chris Meiter of Salient Systems. “Users feel confident their information is secure and reliable.”

Despite bandwidth becoming more available and cost-effective, it is still not practical for most end users to upload all video to the cloud for recording.

“It would be rare to have the bandwidth available to actually record directly to the cloud. What we are seeing is people understanding how automatic cloud backups, including trickling backups to the cloud, work and can be successful,” says Digital Watchdog’s Mark Espenschied.

In fact, this is the most common cloud-based model used today, Meiter says.

“A popular option is the ability for the NVRs to connect to the cloud and offload video for longer-term storage,” he says. “This also allows the client the ability to deploy a redundant and off-site recording architecture for mission-critical backup and compliance regulations.”

For this reason, says Evan Davis, senior manager of solutions engineering, TRENDnet, Torrance, Calif., his company does not recommend cloud-based recording at the moment.

“In the future, there is a possibility that there will be more cost-effective cloud-based recording solutions, but today, we recommend having your own storage solution with redundancy, which limits accessibility and is more secure,” he says.

While there are still limitations today, there is no question that cloud-based recording will become a major factor someday soon, Meiter says.

“In the near future we will see more and more opportunities where our customers and clients will be requesting either all of their video being sent to the cloud for cost of onsite, long-term cost implications or incremental information backed up in the cloud for compliance and peace of mind concerns of retaining information off site, due to security risks and potential environmental conditions,” he says.

This article goes with the article “Recording Tech Gives RMR a Boost” at www.SDMmag.com/recording-tech-boosts-RMR.com