Hybrid Cloud forVideo Surveillance
What it is and why you’ll want one.

Video Surveillance Systems Present New Challenges to Enterprises
Video surveillance systems across the world generated anaverage of 2,000+ petabytes of data every day in 2019,according to industry experts IHS Technologies. Since then,
the numbers continue to rise.

retail, healthcare, manufacturing, banking, education,
government, and more—the pressure put on existing
infrastructure can become critical and stretch staff
members and budgets past the breaking point.

It’s no wonder, then, that organizations across the globe
are struggling to find solutions to more easily store andmanage their video data, especially when the task falls to
infrastructure and operations leaders, who typically don’t
have backgrounds in IT.

Right now, many organizations simply continue to use what
they’re familiar with: on-premises storage and a video
management system. Others have already ventured into
the emerging realm of video storage based completely
in the cloud. For everyone else, the answer might lie
somewhere in between—and that means a hybrid solution.

As video surveillance becomes more common—not onlyin law enforcement or public safety situations, but also in

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1Hybrid Cloud: The Best of Both Worlds
The cloud is swiftly becoming critical to business successacross every industry. Its benefits include:• Greater agility for adopting new technologies
such as analytics and computer vision• Scalable, flexible use of bandwidth andother resources• Anywhere, anytime availability of video
footage and applications

Go Hybrid and Reap the Benefits

Hybrid cloud is becoming more common in theinformation technology world and has significant
advantages for surveillance video storage, especially formedium to large installations. These advantages include:

Organizations can choose from public or private cloud offerings.

PUBLIC CLOUD: Requires an agreement with acloud service provider, such as AWS or Microsoft Azure,in which you pay for the use of their distributed data
center infrastructure.

PRIVATE CLOUD: A dedicated cloud architecturethat only your organization can access. It’s often
deployed and hosted in an on-premises data center,but can also be offsite and managed by a third party.

HYBRID CLOUD: An approach that manyorganizations prefer today. It involves the use ofboth on-site infrastructure and public clouds.

DID YOUKNOW?
WASABI / HYBRID CLOUD FOR VIDEO SURVEILLANCE• Investment protection of existing endpoints, servers, and VMS
and applications.
• Open architecture that allows for a best-of-breed technologies
throughout the infrastructure and the ability to adopt newtechnologies quicker.
• Less hardware that organizations physically have to own and babysit.
• The ability to copy all local recordings to the cloud for backup
purposes for protection against local hardware failure, file corruption,and malicious destruction.
• A cloud copy that can be used for remote access to videos. It canbe easier to access them from the cloud than from local storage.
• Increased data safety—the cloud is often safer than on-site storage.
• Scalability on demand—if an organization adds more cameras,
increases resolution, increases frame rate or activity, or lengthens theretention period, they don’t have to buy more hardware.

Organizations can get up to 2.5 times more value out of a hybrid
cloud approach than they get from a single cloud and single vendor.
Source: IBM Institute for Business Value, 20192

As Video Becomes Ubiquitous, Storage and Management Get Tougher
More organizations are beginning to use video surveillance, as video technology and systems get more portable,
cost-efficient, and sophisticated. The more an organization relies on video surveillance, the more difficult it will become
to store and manage the massive volumes of footage being generated.
There are three main reasons for that.

1 FILE SIZES ARE GROWING EXPONENTIALLY.

As cameras offer ever-higher resolution, they can provide
more information, even allowing businesses to zoom in on
faces, analyze license plates, and so on. But finer detail alsomeans those files are bigger than ever—and while the needfor video storage is increasing to accommodate larger files,
storage budgets aren’t growing to meet that demand.

2 RETENTION PERIODS ARE ON THE RISE.

Every organization is required to comply with various local,
state, federal, and industry regulations that mandate how thatbusiness uses and stores its data, including video files. Table 1
shows a range of typical retention periods across industries.

TABLE 1. TYPICAL RETENTION PERIODS BY INDUSTRY

Video files can be compressed to help reduce some storage
requirements, but compression rates alone won’t be able
to offset the amount of video being generated by today’s
advanced cameras.

INDUSTRY

TYPICAL MINIMUM RETENTION PERIOD
without any occurrence of an event

RetailThree to five days

Prisons, detention centers

Seven years

Law enforcement - body-wornand patrol car cameras

30 days to 99 years

Banking

180 days

Food processing

Seven days

Gaming/gambling

Seven to 30 days

Healthcare - hospitals

30 days

Manufacturing – factories/plants

Seven days

State/local government – citywide
surveillance

Seven to 30 days

Source: Gartner, Market Guide for Video Surveillance Management Systems, July 9, 2018

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33 THE VALUE OF DATA IS INCREASING.

Advanced analytics and AI capabilities allow users to get
more value out of stored files, which is causing organizations
to want to retain more data for longer periods of time.
Imagine if you could analyze foot traffic patterns over timein your retail location to determine where to place high-ticket
items in various seasons. Or what if you could get a detailed
view of the different types of vehicles traversing your city
streets throughout the day and automatically adjust traffic
lights to minimize gridlock?
Getting more value from this kind of data is a significant
benefit for all organizations—but it means they will need tokeep that data longer, which only adds to the complexity ofstorage and management as the amount of data grows.

The Bottom Line:A New Approach to Video Storage Is Needed

Organizations are now keeping larger files and an expandedlibrary of video footage for much longer periods of time in

DID
YOU
KNOW?

order to comply with regulations. This increased storage helps
data analytics, too, as the accuracy of data analytics depends
on the amount of data retained and analyzed.
As video surveillance technology has evolved, so must video
storage. You need a scalable storage strategy that can adapt
to the changing surveillance storage landscape—and a video
management system that allows you to quickly, easily findand use the files you need.
That’s where the cloud comes in. While it’s still fairly novelfor organizations to rely on the cloud for video surveillance
storage, it’s becoming more and more clear that the benefitsof the cloud make it the smart choice for storing andmanaging video footage today.
Before we move into the benefits of cloud storage, let’s see
why your on-premises storage won’t be able to keep up withyour data.

The global video surveillance market is expected to grow from $45.5 billion in2020 to $74.6 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 10.4%. Reasons include:• Mounting public safety and security concerns• Increased adoption of IP cameras• Growing demand for wireless and spy cameras• Rise of “smart city” and city surveillance initiatives• Continuing advancements in Big Datatechnology and applications• Advances in artificial intelligence anddeep learning technologies
Source: MarketsandMarkets, April 2020

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Why On-Premises Storage Isn’t EnoughSince the advent of video surveillance, video files have been kept on-premises. In fact, they still are for most organizations.
A majority of systems still rely on built-in storage capabilities, whether they’re legacy digital video recorders (DVRs) or
newer network video recorders (NVRs) that work with connected IP cameras. Video files are often stored on on-premises
servers or on tapes or other physical media.
As your video files grow, however, these low-capacity solutions simply won’t provide the space you need, or the manageability
features that allow you to access and analyze that data so it can benefit your business.

On-Premises Storage

THE PROS:THE CONS:• It’s what you know. Your staff is already trained.

• As you run out of space, you are forced to choose between• Files are onsite, readily accessible.

deleting video files or purchasing additional storage.

• You have absolute control over that video footage,• On-site storage technology needs to be refreshedfrom security to configuration.

every three to five years, which means more money spent• You don’t need to worry about bandwidth.

on equipment and more time spent on data migration.
• Physical media can be destroyed, misplaced, or stolen.
And even files in on-premises servers can be lost forgood if that server fails.
• IT spends a lot of time and effort managing, configuring,and updating the systems.
• And on-premises storage doesn’t come cheap …

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On-Premises Storage: The High Cost of Ownership
Using on-premises storage to retain the video footage created by your surveillance systems costs a lot. In fact, someexperts estimate that video storage alone can eat up almost a third of your budget. One report found that on-premises
storage for retail video surveillance deployments was 30% for traditional cameras and 25% for networked cameras.*
Today, there’s no reason that percentage has to be so high for video storage. Table 2 shows other cost considerations
when it comes to on-premises video storage.

VIDEO STORAGE CAN EAT UP BUDGETS
30%

25%

#1: On-premises Central Video Storage#2: Cameras#3: Servers
20%#4: Networking
15%#5: Software
10%* Source: NetApp, 2017.

TABLE 2. OTHER COST CONSIDERATIONS FOR ON-PREMISES VIDEO STORAGE
HARD COSTS

Up-front capital expense of hardware and software, infrastructure
costs of networking, power, cooling, and floor space

SOFT COSTS

Staffing, training, product acquisition and lead times, installationand maintenance, technology refreshes and data migrations

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Moving Video to the Cloud: Pros and ConsAs the high cost and limitations of traditional on-premises
storage become more apparent, businesses have begun
turning to the cloud as a new way to store video data. The
cloud can make storing and accessing large files, such asvideo files, quick and easy.
A report by Gartner found that “cloud-based VMS (video
management system) providers are increasingly being
evaluated as an alternative solution to on-premises video
surveillance solutions. Pay per use and ease of management
are the key drivers for cloud-based VMS.”*

When you decide to move your video data to the cloud, you’ll
likely go with one of two options: a single vendor that provides
everything from cameras to software to storage, or a systems
integrator that offers a mix of third-party solutions. Whichever
you choose, you’ll want to make sure you get a reliable,
affordable solution that is infinitely scalable and makes yourdata easily available.
But no system is ideal for every use case or business need.
Even the cloud has its advantages and disadvantages.

* Source: Gartner, Market Guide for Video Surveillance Management Systems, July 9, 2018

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Cloud Storage

THE PROS:THE CONS:• Bottomless capacity means you can increase frame rate,• Cloud storage subscriptions can turn out to be extremely expensive

resolution, retention periods, or number of devices without

over the years, especially when you want to access your data.

any impact to existing hardware• Many cloud-based storage solutions don’t integrate with physical• Flexibility of plans, pricing, retention periods, notification
alerts, etc.

surveillance infrastructure or evidence management systems.
• The most popular cloud service providers offer a range of pricing• No need to own, maintain, or manage the equipment

and storage tiers, which causes confusion and tough decisions about• Extremely low up-front capital expense

where to store data.

• Video footage is safe in the cloud and can’t be destroyed• Most of the video collected by an organization is never used, and it

or lost when hardware fails

can be expensive to send data to storage over expensive networks.

• Anywhere, anytime accessibility of video data

• Using a provider’s network to transmit video data means that an
outage could keep you from accessing that data, or even result in lost
data if transmission was interrupted by the outage.

As is the case with most technologies, the challenges of cloud-based video storage will decrease with time as new
capabilities become available and issues with video compression, bandwidth, integration, and security are resolved.
In the meantime, however, there is a storage strategy that can minimize the disadvantages and enhance theadvantages of cloud storage: the hybrid approach.

DID
YOU
KNOW?

Although Gartner considers cloud-based video surveillance to be a “nascent but
steadily developing market,” it found that law enforcement agencies aresome of the most common users of the technology, thanks to the“mobile nature of body-worn cameras” and because “most leading body-worn
camera vendors provide evidence management in the cloud.”
Source: Gartner, Market Guide for Video Surveillance Management Systems, July 9, 2018

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More Perks, Lower Costs with Hybrid CloudWith a hybrid approach to video surveillance storage, you can
get the best of on-site infrastructure and public clouds andminimize the hassles. By combining public clouds with youron-premises data center, you can mix and match where you
store your data to best suit your needs.
Hybrid cloud lets you leverage your existing on-premises
infrastructure while preventing the need to replace or extend
that infrastructure with additional hardware as storage
capacity runs out.
Consider this: As surveillance data ages, it becomes less andless likely that you’ll need to access it. Up to 90% of youron-premises storage capacity can be this older data that
could be off-loaded to lower-cost cloud storage—thereby
freeing up your primary storage for the latest video files. You
don’t have to delete that older data, which you might have

DID
YOU
KNOW?

had to do in the past without the unlimited scale of cloudstorage, but it also doesn’t have to be kept in the mostexpensive tier of storage.
Every gigabyte of data you clear from your primary storagetranslates into real-life savings because you are delaying theneed to purchase additional on-premises storage devices.
With a hybrid approach, you can upload video files to thecloud when it’s convenient—such as after hours when yournetwork is free of other traffic. It also provides an offsite
copy of your video that can be used to restore files if youron-premises infrastructure goes down or is interrupted bynatural disaster. And in the event your internet connection
goes down and you can’t reach the cloud, you can continue
business operations with the video footage you still haveon-premises.

The data retention policy of the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department
mandates that footage captured by body-worn cameras are retained for thefollowing time periods:
		
		
		

• Videos that don’t depict a crime – 90 days
• Videos related to a citizen complaint – 5 to 10 years• Videos subject to Freedom of Information Act requests – indefinitely

Source: MPDC, 2015

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Power Your Hybrid Cloud with Wasabi Hot Storage
When it comes to affordable, reliable cloud storage for video surveillance data, Wasabi is a clear winner. Wasabi hot cloudstorage allows you to maintain all the features that your video management system (VMS) needs on-premises whileempowering you to benefit from the cost savings of the cloud. And you’ll never run out of storage capacity.

What Diﬀerentiates Wasabi from the Competition?
BREAKTHROUGH ECONOMICS / As the industry’s lowest-priced cloud storage service,
Wasabi makes it cost-effective to store and maintain massive collections of video files in thecloud. You’ll pay 80% less than the price of the leading “hot tiers” from AWS S3, Microsoft
Azure Blob, and Google Cloud.
INSTANT ACCESSIBILITY / With “archive tiers” from the other guys, you could be waiting up
to 15 hours to get access to the video footage you need. With Wasabi, all of your video files are
instantly accessible, whenever you need them. Archive tiers are a bad idea for organizations thatneed speedy access to video data or need to move files in and out of cloud storage very often.
EXTREME DATA DURABILITY AND INTEGRITY / Wasabi hot cloud storage provides 11 9s
of object durability. That translates to 99.999999999% reliability, or the likelihood that you’ll
never experience data loss in your lifetime. Wasabi also supports data immutability to protect
against accidental deletions, ransomware, and viruses. Immutability means that video files
saved in your preconfigured “bucket” cannot be deleted or altered in any way, by anyone,throughout its storage lifetime.

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10INTEGRATION WITH TODAY’S MOST COMMON VIDEO MANAGEMENT TOOLS ANDTECHNOLOGY PARTNERS / With Wasabi, you won’t need to worry about integration with yourfavorite VMS and analysis tools. Wasabi supports a simple, standards-based REST API that is
100% bit-compatible with AWS S3, so any video management application that works with S3
will work great with Wasabi. Our open ecosystem and long-time relationships with technology
partners allow you to create a best-of-breed video surveillance solution and makes it easy tomove workloads from place to place.
SUPER-FAST PERFORMANCE / Our highly parallelized system architecture gives you abouta six-fold read/write performance advantage over competitors like S3. And Wasabi delivers
significantly faster time-to-first-byte speeds. In fact, Wasabi is markedly faster than S3—evenfor Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud customers. That means whether you’re executing video
analytics and AI-driven search functions locally or on a cloud compute service like EC2,
Wasabi can deliver your content more quickly for faster processing and analysis.

Low cost, high speed, fast access, and ultra secure. All-hot storage at cold storage prices.
That’s the value of Wasabi hot cloud storage.

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CLOUD STORAGE COST COMPARISON
100 TB Storage+900 assuming 10% egress+API request charges+Data retrieval charges

Egress$900• Wasabi - $599 per mo.
• AWS S3 - $2,300 per mo.
• AWS IA - $1,250 per mo.
• AWS IA1Z - $1,000 per mo.

AWS,
Azure,
GoogleCloud$2,300 mo.

$599
mo.
Wasabi

DID
YOU
KNOW?

Egress$900
AWS,
Azure,
GoogleCloud$1,250 mo.

Egress$900
AWS,
Azure,
GoogleCloud$1,050 mo.

Wasabi hot cloud storage is a universal, one-size-fits-all cloud storage service
that eliminates confusing service tiers and satisfies nearly all performancerequirements. Wasabi hot cloud storage costs exponentially less than
traditional storage options and is significantly faster.

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But Wait, There’s MoreIn addition to the benefits we’ve already mentioned, Wasabi hot cloud storage can help you in two other key areas.
VIDEO ANALYTICS AND DATA LAKESWith low-cost, instantly accessible cloud storage, you cancreate data lakes, or repositories of raw, unstructured or
structured data captured from a multitude of devices. You
can then use analytics applications on this pooled video data
to minimize shrinkage from theft and fraud, for instance, ormonitor customer service, detect manufacturing anomalies,
and so on. Because Wasabi keeps all of your video data “hot”
and available, you can run analytics programs on demand—even in the background to flag predetermined behaviors
or events.

WASABI / HYBRID CLOUD FOR VIDEO SURVEILLANCESECURITY AND REGULATORY COMPLIANCE
Wasabi can help you maintain compliance with ever-evolving
regulations and enable you to confidently store your mostsensitive video data securely. Our storage services aredesigned to meet security best practices and standards,
including HIPAA, HITECH, FINRA, CJIS, and FERPA. And we
provide powerful identity management and access controls,
and inherent encryption for data at rest to protect digitalrights and safeguard intellectual property.

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NEXT STEPS• CONTACT WASABI TODAY.
Learn more about our price, performance, and protection benefits.
• TRY WASABI FOR FREE. Get up to 1 TB for 30 days

KEY FEATURES• Ultra-low-cost pricing• No egress fees for retrieving yourvideo files from the cloud

ABOUT WASABI
Wasabi provides simple, predictable, and affordable hot cloud storage for businesses all over
the world. It enables organizations to store and instantly access an infinite amount of data at
1/5 the price of the competition with no complex tiers or unpredictable egress fees. Trusted bytens of thousands of customers worldwide, Wasabi has been recognized as one of technology’s
fastest-growing and most visionary companies. It was created by Carbonite co-founders andcloud storage pioneers David Friend and Jeff Flowers, and is a privately held company based in
Boston.

• Instant accessibility• Digital evidence preservationand protection• Regulatory compliance• Industry-leading performance

BENEFITS• Store more video for longer at less cost
• No need to choose between saving
money and keeping data
• Apply analytics to video pools to create“data lakes”• Pay-as-you-grow scalability• Inherent resiliency and data integrity©2021 Wasabi Technologies, Inc. All rights reserved. WASABI and the WASABI Logo are trademarks of Wasabi Technologies, Inc. and may not be
used without permission of Wasabi Technologies, Inc. All other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be thetrademarks of their respective holder(s).

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