How to Reap RMR From the Cloud
Find out how managed/hosted access and Cloud-based video recording, retrieval and storage solutions are leading the charge for cultivating SaaS offerings and profits.
Installing access control and video solutions and also managing them on an ongoing basis is among the industry’s hottest RMR prospects.
Ease of Upgrading Customers
Now that we have covered the ideal customers, let’s talk about a few of the advantages that are often overlooked. An attractive application of Cloud-based video surveillance is integration with an intrusion or access control system.
Leading Cloud systems providers have properly documented public and open APIs, which facilitate integration.
The integration of a Cloud-based system (as opposed to a volume of separate, onsite systems) ensures a more reliable connectivity with consistent functionality across the multisite systems.
The integration is completed and maintained by the manufacturer in the Cloud, rather than being done onsite. This increases reliability and ease of deployment.
The benefits of Cloud security systems are numerous and quite familiar to the IT department. There is good reason the federal government and every major IT department has a policy of Cloud first.
A simple listing of advantages we have all seen, but let’s talk about the advantages in terms of your customer, and then you the integrator.
For your customer, the benefits can be articulated around major technical differences: higher availability, better disaster recovery, comprehensive cyber-security, user interface responsiveness, open API support for integrations and multisite support by default.
However, one benefit not often discussed or understood is the value of continuous software delivery. In a true Cloud-based system the Cloud provider executes the software upgrades and relieves the customer and integrator from this task.
This ensures the customer always has the latest, most secure and most feature-rich software. In a traditional on-site system, the customer must perform upgrades themselves.
This requires performing backups in case something goes wrong, allocating downtime, scheduling the IT staff and performing the upgrades.
Upgrades are often needed to get the latest features, work with the latest cameras or fix cyber vulnerabilities, but they are often postponed because of the cost and headache.
With a Cloud system, your customer benefits from immediate upgrades with new features and security immediately. No more waiting and no more interruptions.
For integrators, the specific value of Cloud system benefits are less easily defined because they’re based on what the integrator chooses to use.
Cloud-based security systems enable integrators to focus their expertise on networking and operations as opposed to the cyber risks associated with operating systems, recorders and security cameras.
The overall characterization of the benefits can be rolled up into the term: cost to serve. In other words, they are related to the costs you incur in serving the customer’s operational and service needs.
In this light, the benefits of managing all of your customers across a single user interface for the purposes of remote administration, power cycling of cameras, troubleshooting of network issues, storing of installation related details, among other advantages, is powerful. And saves you money.
With a Cloud video surveillance system, a customer can call you to extend storage on half of their enterprisewide cameras and you can increase their bill without rolling a truck.
The benefits are only limited by your level of interest in reducing your cost to serve. From a pricing perspective, Cloud-based systems have trended down over the past five years (even with a dramatic increase in functionality) while onsite systems with similar R&D investments have trended up.
The why is simple: the onsite systems market is not expanding at the rate of Cloud-based market. Cloud-based systems get tremendous economies of scale because they are buying storage and servers in large quantity and automating their operations.
These cost savings are passed on to the customers. In the long run, economies of scale and specialization have been proven over and over to provide better products at lower costs, in any market economy. The examples of this are countless.
Dean Drako is President and CEO of Eagle Eye Networks, a provider of Cloud-based access control and video surveillance products for physical security and business operations applications.
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Great article! We have over 5 online monthly cameras with Camcloud.com. They seem to have figured out the dealer branding portion very well and their software is extremely easier for my customers to use. The diagram references eagle eye networks gateway needing to be used for cloud surveillance, but Camcloud doesn’t require any of this. They build all the software and camera API’s that allow for direct camera to “cloud” server. The onsite gateway seems like another point of failure, in my opinion.