EpiCamera Cloud Surveillance

Surveillance video is almost always stored for later retrieval and review. The average storage duration is around 30 days. However, a small percentage of organization store video for much shorter (7 days) or for much longer (some for a few years).

The two most important drivers for determining storage duration is the cost of storage and the security threats an organization faces.

While storage is always getting cheaper, video surveillance demands huge amount of storage. For comparison, Google's email service offer about 7 GB of free email storage. This is considered to be an enormous amount for email. However, a single camera could consume that much storage in a day. It is fairly common for video surveillance systems to require multiple TBs of storage even with only a few dozen cameras. Because storage is such a significant cost, numerous techniques exist to optimize the use of storage.

The type of security threats also impact determining storage duration. For instance, a major threat at banks is the report of fraudulent investigations. These incidents are often not reported by affected customers until 60 or 90 days after the incident. As such, banks have great need for longer term storage. By contrast, casinos usually know about issues right away and if a problem is to arise they learn about it in the same week. Casinos then, very frequently, use much shorter storage duration (a few weeks is common).

Four fundamental types of storage may be selected:

•	Internal storage uses hard drives built inside of a DVR, NVR or server. Today this is still the most common form of storage. With hard drives of up to 2 TB common today, internal storage generally provides total storage of 4TB to 8TB. Internal storage is the cheapest option but tends to be less scalable than the other options.
•	Directly Attached storage is when hard drives are located outside of the DVR, NVR or server but are 'directly' connected without having to use an IP network. Examples of this include USB and eSATA. This is an inexpensive way to add dedicated storage to a single 'box' typically at low cost and with a simple setup.
•	Networked Storage, such as NAS or SAN, are IP based 'pools' of storage specialized in storing video from large numbers of cameras. Multiple DVRs, NVRs or servers can stream video to these storage clusters. They provide efficient, flexible and scalable storage for very large camera counts but generally at higher cost and complexity.
•	Onboard Camera allows embedding storage inside the camera itself typically by way of SD card and rarely hard drives. With this approach, the camera can record locally, reducing network use and dependence. Of the 4 types, this is the least commonly used but likely the most interesting for future potential.

The clear majority of surveillance projects still prefer using internal or direct attached storage. However, networked storage is gaining in popularity. And cloud storage provided by EpiCamera, is definitely the trend in online video surveillance!

Storage Redundancy: A second, yet still important aspect is whether your surveillance storage has redundancy, specifically how capable it is to survive a hard drive crash. In the old days, this was rare. However, this is now becoming more and more common.