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Control room in the cloud

Control rooms offer diverse benefits in terms of cost-effectiveness and efficiencies to customers. Firstly, they use economies of scale to provide services to customers using the best technology, as well as established, reputable processes, and certified people – if these services are offered by an accredited security service provider. There are also improved response and audit capabilities offered as a value add to customers.

The entry-level barriers to offering control rooms comes at quite a steep cost and requires time and expertise to establish. Companies need to invest a capital lump sum to develop these control rooms in terms of infrastructure, video walls, monitoring software, and the training of operators.

In contrast to on-premises computing, the advantages of cloud computing are obvious in terms of cost efficiency, flexibility, adaptability, scalability and performance, to name a few. Therefore, service providers have no option but to consider these benefits and to offer them as a service to customers. An example of this is the Surveillance-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering.

The advantage of the SaaS model is that there is no huge upfront cost in terms of establishing the control room, as access is granted using a browser accessing an existing control room in the cloud. Infrastructure, networking, solution software, storage, procedures, and people are already in place, resulting in huge cost savings and efficiency improvements.

The entry-level barrier in terms of infrastructure and technology is lower as only a workstation accessing a website through a browser is required to provide the control room in the cloud. Major advantages are the timeframe and effort involved to get this up and running, and the ability to leverage industry best practices/procedures and scale based on customer growth. Accessibility due to cloud deployment allows customers and relevant stakeholders to access footage from anywhere at any time on any web device via a secured virtual private network (VPN).

The control room in the cloud opens huge opportunities for various existing, as well as new players in the security provider market.

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