CCTV consultant Simon Lambert has challenged those who believe analogue surveillance cameras are ill-suited to the digital age and should be replaced as soon as is financially feasible.
Lambert, an occasional IFSEC Global contributor whose recent story about CCTV settings is September’s most read article, felt “driven to reply” to a recent article on this site called Social Housing, CCTV and Cloud Storage: Challenging the Myths About IP Video Surveillance.
The feature, which was penned by NSPR technology writer Caroline Bullock, argued that a “new breed of cameras are better equipped than ever to remedy some of the long-standing cost and efficiency issues that have blighted the performance of their analogue counterparts.” In the social housing sector, she wrote, “loyalty to the traditional systems has long prevailed, largely down to that mantra of ‘better the devil you know’.”
But Lambert, an engineer with 27 years’ experience in commercial, military and security systems design, believes the debate surrounding CCTV systems shouldn’t be framed around a simplistic, binary, analogue versus IP choice. Responding ‘below the line’ in the comments section, he wrote: “Anyone who is concerned about the difference between ‘digital’ and ‘analogue’ is wasting their energy. Use the most appropriate to meet your purposes.
“Don’t worry what others are doing. They might be idiots who are easily misled.”
Bullock said the Hatton Garden raid exposed analogue equipment’s “susceptibility to tampering and vandalism with thieves disabling the camera and removing the hard drives containing footage from an on-premises digital video recorder.
“A cloud-based alternative with capabilities for remote monitoring would have rendered such a move impossible with real-time footage stored and secured in a remote data centre. Furthermore, the required imagery would have been available to the police within minutes rather than almost a week after the incident as happened in this case.”
Connectivity issues
If even our fridge is destined to go online, then surely the CCTV camera will too? But as anyone who lives in the surprisingly numerous areas with appallingly slow broadband speeds can attest, the internet of things is often hobbled by connectivity issues.
“I have yet to have explained to me by cloud proponents how anything but a hugely fast ‘up-link’ (thereby expensive and fallible) from their client’s premises can give high-quality, real-time footage from many cameras. Video compression is the quality killer.”
And of course analogue cameras – counter-intuitively perhaps – does not preclude digital recording.
“Pretty much all analogue CCTV has been recorded digitally for years now,” continues Lambert. “So, it could easily be connected to the internet for ‘monitoring the bins’. Maybe people who appear to be ‘firmly attached to their analogue counterparts’ are the ones not easily hoodwinked. They know that, in reality, IP cameras are clearly not essential if you want remote viewing.”
Citing a report by Housing Technology magazine and Cloudview Bullock wrote that “the costly installation and low quality recorded footage of the traditional analogue systems along with their tendency to be vandalised are simply no longer fit for purpose in an era of the internet of things, IP-enabled devices and the increasingly omnipresent smartphone and tablet.”
But Lambert, who is Technical Lead on the CCTV National Standards Forum and sits on the British Standards Institution CCTV committee, posed the question: “If analogue cameras have a ‘tendency to be vandalised’, what makes digital cameras immune?”
Bullock cited the case study of “national housing provider the Accent Group, which has recently begun to use Cloudview [a cloud-based service whose founder we interviewed last year] and has plans to roll out the system across all of its key sites.
“Prior to switching to the cloud-based solution and in common with many of their peers, their deployed surveillance comprised little more than a jumbled assortment of incompatible cameras. Footage was recorded onto local hard drives which once downloaded was often too poor quality to use as hard evidence.
“Furthermore, a contractor would have to be called out at around £100 a time to retrieve the footage, which in turn incurs additional costs when every penny counts. Using a single visual surveillance solution which is easier to install and manage across Accent’s multiple sites ensures authorised users have quick and easy access to high quality footage whenever they want.”
“Poor buying decisions”
But Lambert suggests that analogue systems are not always and inevitably a hotchpotch arrangement. “Why did anyone have a ‘jumbled assortment of incompatible cameras’ except through making their own poor buying decisions? Analogue’s 1Vpp signal has always been far more universal than the proprietary streams created by different makes of IP camera. ONVIF? Don’t be fooled by that.
“Poor footage comes from sloppy design, installation and maintenance. IP CCTV installers are no less prone to this than analogue installers.
“Paying a contractor £100 to come and retrieve footage shows a lamentable lack of training for the owner. This has absolutely nothing to do with the analogue versus digital debate. Better organised owners can do it for themselves at zero charge.
Lambert believes that cloud storage is has more flaws than its proponents will admit. “Cloud operators will likely make owners pay for footage export too. Wherever they hide it, they’re not voluntary services are they?”
“Why is a cloud-based system easier to install? With the vulnerability and third-party telco issues of a connection to the internet, I would suspect that it is not less complex than a standalone solution.”
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CCTVgeek Whilst in a local raid 1st thing the attackers did was steal the (unsecured!) DVRs, agreed the cloud can’t be relied upon – yet.
casasecurityuk Old school: before raid, cut phoneline, alarm activates, response. Cloud CCTV: before raid, cut phoneline, steal gear. Done?
As always, proponents of the “Cloud” as the IT industry’s less than perfect solution to all things analogue, conveniently overlooks a number of negative factors which if weighed up against alternatives, really don’t make Cloud storage for video surveillance anywhere near as attractive, as it is to the service providers. As such, in the recently announced TRUSTED CCTV Operational Standards, exclusive storage of video surveillance images in the Cloud is actually not acceptable, unless it is undertaken as a secondary stream, with the primary recordings being held locally in a secure location. Effective, efficient and responsible use of CCTV isn’t… Read more »
casasecurityuk CCTVgeek Not many DVRs secured behind 4 foot reinforced concrete mistake was leaving them in the same room as the valuables. HG was quite a secure set up so secure they skipped on a system that could have been installed for less than 1000. However the people involved seem to know the set up of alarms very well. Would be quite simple in cloud given the money involved for a hacker to take over the camera IP address and stream an empty secure room to the security system. Giving even more confidence to the alarm company that nothing was happening do… Read more »
DoktorJon Thanks, Jon. As ever, shouting that the Emperor is actually in the nude! 😉
JamesGBC casasecurityuk CCTVgeek Yes, while there is not one foolproof strategy, there’s a lot to be said for not having CCTV connected to the outside world.
SimonLambertConsultant DoktorJon Not so much shouting Simon, as perhaps quietly pointing out that whilst the Emperor may not be adequately covered, with the benefit of millimetric imaging, all that’s less than acceptable is more than easily seen!
SimonLambertConsultant JamesGBC casasecurityuk CCTVgeek Informative, good natured debate chaps. I’m learning a lot.
Very interesting discussion! I am talking my book but we also see advantages of remote access – anywhere, any device without having to create a hole in your firewall, which if anything is a more severe vulnerability for cyber- attack. Archiving on cloud is probably more secure than what any CCTV owner can do; the difficulty of hacking a cloud service with all sophisticated security algorithms is much higher than a what may be afforded by a small busienss owner – both from cost and expertise standpoint. Also, we find that one of our recent wins was after a detailed… Read more »
Hi, As one of the owners of the original VSaaS (now in its thirteenth year of business) I felt compelled to answer. Over the last years there have been many “cloud” based surveillance platforms, many of which have fallen by the wayside. Let’s get one thing straight VSaaS or Cloud Storage is not VMS. It is in our opinion a specific product for a specific purpose, we initiated the VSaaS term so we should be able to define what it is – right? If you are trying to emulate VMS or DVR/NVR in the cloud you will fail – if… Read more »
Christopher Berry Thanks, Chris. Your clarification is helpful.
I’m still uncertain as to the viability of small systems not having any recorder on site. Is it your experience that even a VSaaS customer should have a site recorder too? What are your real world findings from customers who have their primary recording at their provider’s remote site?
SimonLambertConsultant Christopher Berry If a VSaaS customer needs 24/7 recording then, yes, we recommend local recording. If it is just “on occasional event” then VSaaS works well and also as a hybrid of the two – dump video offsite if there is a risk of onsite compromise. We ping the cameras/video servers (we use analogue as well as IP) so we know they are up and we can do lots of automation for things like gate control and telemetry. In the critical national infrastructure market it is very popular, things like mobile phone towers etc. We have a subset of approved cameras and… Read more »
Christopher Berry SimonLambertConsultant That makes sense. The bit that has always stuck in my craw is the idea of replacing a DVR/NVR with just a broadband link to send video off site for its primary recording.
Of course, in some circumstances this may be viable, as you suggest. However, I worry that this is being oversold, often into premises where it is far from being the best alternative. Like a lot of things in the CCTV business.
SimonLambertConsultant Christopher Berry I know, I despair sometimes, it will never replace the DVR/NVR – “cloud” cuckoo land. They put in a gigabit network for the CCTV locally and then expect the same over half a megabit upload on the cheapest broadband they can get. Pfff
Chris
Simon, Chris, excellent points well made gents! Just to add a few quick fluffy bits. The idea of ‘visual verification’ probably dates back to the days of Slow Scan systems in the late 70s, so being able to view images off site (albeit one image every other cup of coffee ) was considered useful even then as a technique for simply keeping an eye on something distant. I have absolutely no problem at all with users adopting a modern day net based solution for remote monitoring where there’s a need, but I do have enormous issues with the idea that… Read more »
I am using a cloud based DVR with my ip camera’s and it works excellent. 1080p with h.264 and a wide angle I/R ip camera and everything is clear night or day. No DVR to hassle with. Free 3 day retention permanently no limitation on number of cameras, its quite nice. If you pay a little more you get more benefits and at $3-$7/mo its a cheaper option than building your own home DVR on the cheap for $1500 bucks. You still in the green for 17 years only paying $7 a month. Totally worth it to switch to cloud… Read more »
fabes Can I ask what your Cloud based DVR and cameras are? And where to buy? thanks
. I caught one teenage yob on an £80 CCTV floodlight but the cops felt sorry for him and let him off with a “caution” (a telling-off) Allegedly the yobs’s parents had kicked him out because he stayed out all hours burgling and doing drugs (Heroin allegedly). An older local addict is far far worse and his main claim to fame was the theft of his father’s car which was easy to do as he knew where the spare -keys were kept. The thief got jail-time for that as his father told the Judge that his patience was exhausted. IMHO… Read more »