Web-based video surveillance adds a new level of functionality and convenience to traditional video surveillance by making live and recorded video of multiple locations available via the Internet.
For businesses with multiple, geographically dispersed locations, Web-based video surveillance assists security departments in four ways:
• Increasing individual productivity – Providing security for multi-location businesses has traditionally been a people-intensive endeavor, with departments scaling up in size as the number of company locations increased. Web-based video enables security directors to get more coverage without increasing headcount, ultimately providing more value to the company. Each security employee can monitor and secure more locations with less travel time and fewer expenses.
• Speeding up investigations – Web-based video surveillance provides a simple and cost-effective way to share information with others when necessary for investigative or legal purposes, as investigations can be completed more rapidly and with fewer resources because of the ease of finding and sharing video clips of incidents. When an incident occurs, anyone with access to video from that location (such as the store manager, the regional manager, the security department and appropriate corporate personnel) can quickly find video of the incident by searching based on time, transaction data, or even for movement in a particular area of the image. They can then save pictures or video clips, or simply e-mail links to the video to colleagues or law enforcement.
• Ensuring compliance – Companies can ensure that employees are following procedures mandated by new regulatory requirements such as the Patriot Act and anti-money laundering laws. According to Kirk Luke, director of loss prevention for nationwide convenience store chain Circle K: “A tremendous amount of responsibility is being placed on security groups that didn’t exist before. The Patriot Act and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) provisions put the onus on businesses to ensure that illegal activity is not occurring in our stores. Remote video enables us to make certain that our stores are following the appropriate procedures to comply with these requirements.”
• Leveraging the security investment – Perhaps the most exciting benefit of Web-based video is that by making video ubiquitous throughout the organization, the security group can frequently get help from other departments that use the system. Groups that historically could not access video, such as IT, operations, marketing and HR are finding compelling uses for video that all contribute to the justification of the video system. “Our primary objective for implementing remote video was originally to protect our employees and customers from theft,” says Scott Bleau, IT director at nationwide fresh-Mex chain Qdoba. “We have since found many more uses for the system and view it as an important tool for understanding and improving our operations.”
