In February 2013 I wrote a post on this blog about the cloud. Hosted software had proven itself for plenty of businesses by then, and I wrote that not every application was ready to follow it. Video was the one I put in that column, and the reason was bandwidth: video is heavy, and the connections of the day could not carry it. I said so in a single sentence: “I believe that video surveillance applications fall into the latter category.”
In that same post I pointed at what was already changing it: “hybrid solutions to allow for some local storage of surveillance video while also delivering some clips and clip control functionality through hosted applications in the cloud.” And I made a prediction, that “smaller video installations will migrate more and more towards hosted platforms for their ease of use and anywhere, any-time access.” Thirteen years later, that is the design I install, and that is who I install it for.
Here is who I am writing this for. You manage buildings you are not standing in, four of them or forty. The engineer is on site, or splits the week across properties. You are somewhere else with a phone and a laptop.
Most video systems installed before the cloud assumed the opposite. The recorder went in the electrical room, the monitor went on the engineer’s desk, the login went on a note under a keyboard, and a clip meant somebody driving over with a USB stick.
The short version. Cloud video surveillance does not change what a camera sees. It changes where the login lives, who can add and remove a person, whether anybody learns a camera went dark on the day it happens, and how long it takes to get a clip from a parking deck into a tenant’s inbox. In the systems I recommend, the recording still happens in the building and the managing happens wherever you are. Many properties keep the cameras they already have.
What Changed Since 2013, and What Did Not
The word cloud gets used three ways in this trade, and the three are not the same product. When you are quoted cloud video surveillance, find out which one is on the paper.
The first is a recorder in the building with a phone app in front of it. What moved is the watching. The accounts still live on that recorder, and if the recorder quits, the app shows you nothing.
The second sends everything up. The cameras stream to a data center, so there is no recorder in a closet to fail. It also puts your video on the building’s internet connection every hour of every day, so ask what a camera does during an outage.
The third is the hybrid, and it is the one I recommend. The recording is made in the building, while the account list, the camera health, the search, and the clip you send out are handled from a platform you reach in a browser. When the internet drops, the cameras keep recording. An outage costs you the reaching, not the record.
Four things did not change. A camera still has to see, and the cloud has no opinion about a lens pointed at a hedge. The record is still made in the building, on the systems I install. The internet still goes down. And a login is still a login, worth exactly as much as the care taken with who holds it.
From your desk: Ask whoever is quoting you which of the three you are buying, and get in writing what it records while the internet is out.
One Login for Every Building You Manage
Count your logins, not your buildings. Every recorder carries its own account list, built by whoever was standing there at the time, and nobody owns cleaning it up. A login created for the third building years ago is still on that list long after the person it was created for has moved on.
On the systems I service, I have watched this on every kind of multi-site account, including one with more than thirty locations that ran one camera system and one login per site for years. Keeping up with that list was a job by itself. Today that customer signs in once and reaches every location.
One platform changes what an account is. A person is added once and sees the buildings you say they can see. A person is removed once, everywhere, from wherever you are when you get the news, which is the logic behind access that expires on its own. On the platform I install, you also get a record of who signed in and who exported a clip, which a shared login cannot give you. Default passwords and firmware are the other half of that.
On the property management accounts I service, video is rarely by itself. The manager covers the exterior: card access on the entrances, cameras on the property around them. Put both on one platform, and a door event and the video of that door become one record, which is the case for video and access on one system and access control in the cloud.
From your desk: Pull the list of everyone who can see your cameras and take off everyone who no longer works in your buildings.
The Clip a Tenant Asks For on Monday
Something happens on the deck on a Saturday night. A car gets broken into, or somebody backs into a column and keeps going. You hear Monday at 8:40, from a tenant who wants the video.
The old path can cost a day: an engineer drives over, finds the recorder, remembers the password, and scrubs a weekend with a mouse. The new path is you, at your desk, with a time range.
What you send matters as much as how fast. Export in the native format with its player, keep the original where it is, and let the copies be copies, which is what makes video hold up later.
Whether the camera belonged there in the first place has a Georgia answer. The state’s eavesdropping and surveillance code makes it unlawful, “without the consent of all persons observed, to observe, photograph, or record the activities of another which occur in any private place and out of public view,” and defines the term it turns on: “'Private place' means a place where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy.” It then carves out why your cameras are up in the first place: “For an owner or occupier of real property to use for security purposes, crime prevention, or crime detection any device to observe, photograph, or record the activities of persons who are on the property or an approach thereto in areas where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.”
Read that as the shape of where a property’s cameras belong: the deck, the lobby, the corridors, the loading area, and the approaches, the places where nobody expects privacy. Inside a tenant’s suite is the tenant’s business, and the tenant’s system. The same code has a separate paragraph on giving or distributing a recording, and it turns on the same private-place test, so who else is in a clip is a question for your counsel before it is a question for me. Your counsel reads the rest. I read cameras.
From your desk: Pull the clip yourself, send it to the person who asked, and keep the record of who else has one.
The Camera That Stopped in June
Here is the failure nobody sees, and it is the one that turns every other feature on this page into paperwork.
On the systems I service, when a request for video comes back empty, the usual reason is not that the camera missed the event. It is that the camera stopped weeks or months earlier and nobody had a reason to look. A camera goes offline in June. The lot looks the same to everyone who parks in it. In October somebody asks for the twelfth, and there is no twelfth.
The failure comes in three versions wearing the same face. The camera drops off the network, often after a power event, which is one more reason to know what an outage does to a security system. The recorder’s drive starts failing. Or nothing electrical fails at all: a sign goes up, a box truck parks in the same spot every morning, or a crape myrtle grows into the shot.
The platform I install closes two of those three, on the day they happen instead of the day you need the footage. A camera that stops reporting raises an alert, and so does a recorder drive with a problem. The third stays honest work, because no system will tell you a hedge grew.
From your desk: Turn on health alerts for every camera and every recorder, and send them to a person who reads email.
The Deck at Two in the Morning
Analytics is the part of this that gets the most attention in a sales meeting, so here is the installer’s version.
It earns its place where nothing should be moving. A loading dock at two in the morning. The top level of a deck after the last tenant leaves. Point a loitering or line-crossing rule at a space that is empty on a schedule and the alert means something every time it fires. Point it at a lobby at noon and you have built a machine that reports normal life, and within a week nobody opens its alerts.
The feature that pays for itself is search. Ask for a person in a red shirt near the east entrance between six and nine, or every vehicle that came through the gate after hours, and, on the platform I install, an afternoon of scrubbing becomes minutes. There is more on where analytics are worth the money.
Plate reading is real, and it needs a camera set up for plates: its own lens, angle, and exposure. A general-view camera with infrared in the housing hands you a white rectangle where the characters should be, for the reasons I laid out about night vision. If somebody quotes plate recognition on cameras already pointed at your entrance, ask which camera is doing the reading.
From your desk: Turn on one rule, on one camera, over one space that should be empty after hours, and live with it a week before you turn on a second.
You May Not Need New Cameras
This is the part that saves the most money and the part that is easiest to skip. Most of what a camera system costs is not the camera. It is the wire in the walls, the conduit on the roof, the lift, and the labor of reaching a fourth-floor deck corner. That part stays.
Whether your cameras carry over comes down to whether they speak a shared language. An industry body called ONVIF publishes profiles for this: “An ONVIF profile has a fixed set of features that must be supported by a conformant device and client. It ensures that a client that conforms to Profile T, for example, will work with a device that also conforms to Profile T.”
The catch is the sentence after it: “Conformance to profiles is the only way that ensures compatibility between ONVIF conformant products; therefore, only registered products with conformance to a profile are considered to be ONVIF conformant.” Supporting ONVIF and being listed as conformant are two different claims, and there is a public list of conformant products to check against.
On the systems I service, IP cameras from the last several years usually carry over. Analog cameras do not, because they were never speaking that language, and our commercial video surveillance page walks through the difference. The recorder is the piece that most often changes, and that is one box in one closet.
From your desk: Send your camera model numbers to whoever services the system and ask which appear on the conformant products list.
How a Building Pays for It
Same cameras, same platform, two different conversations with your owner, depending on how you buy it. Bought as a service, the system is an operating expense, and whether any of it passes through to tenants is a question your lease form answers. Bought as equipment, it is a capital request with a depreciation schedule and a different approval path. Read the security services language in your lease form, or ask whoever wrote it.
Find Out This Week What You Actually Have
None of this needs a technician. It takes a phone, one closet door, and an hour spread across a week.
- Count the recorders and count the logins. Every building, every closet. Write both numbers down. If the two numbers match, every building is its own island, and that is your first finding.
- Find out who holds each one. Then the harder question: is anybody on those lists no longer working in your buildings? A contractor whose job ended, or someone who moved on.
- Time one clip. Ask for thirty seconds of parking deck video from last Tuesday afternoon, and note when it reaches your inbox and in what format.
- Ask when a camera last went dark, and who noticed. If nobody knows, you have found the gap this whole post is about.
- Read the security services line in your lease form. Know now whether this is an operating line you can pass through or a capital request you have to make.
What I Would Do, in the Order I Would Do It
- One login that reaches every building, with everybody who left taken off it. It costs the least and closes the oldest hole.
- Health alerts on every camera and every recorder, going to a person. Until this is on, you do not know what you own. It usually finds a camera or two dark long enough that nobody remembers them.
- A clip path a tenant can use. One person who can pull video, one format you send, one place the original stays. Practice it on a quiet week.
- Then analytics, in the places that are empty after hours. An alert is worth something only on a system somebody already trusts.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is cloud video surveillance for a multi-tenant property?
The cameras and, in the designs I install, the recorder stay in the building, while the account list, the camera health, the search, and the clips you send out are handled from a platform you reach in a browser. For a manager, the change is one login covering every property instead of one per closet.
Does cloud video keep recording if the building’s internet goes down?
On the hybrid design I install, yes. The cameras record onto a device in the same building, so recording continues through the outage and the footage is waiting when the circuit comes back. What you lose while it is down is the remote access. In a design that sends everything up, ask what each camera holds on its own.
Do I have to replace my cameras to move to a cloud platform?
Usually not. IP cameras from the last several years generally carry over if they are ONVIF conformant, which you can check by model number against the public conformant products list. Analog cameras do not. The recorder is the piece that most often changes, and the wiring, which is the expensive part, stays where it is.
Can I share parking deck video with a tenant?
Georgia’s code has one paragraph on recording and a separate one on giving or distributing a recording, and both turn on whether the activity happened in a private place, out of public view. Where the camera was pointed and who else appears in the clip are questions for your counsel. The installer’s part is simple: send a copy, keep the original, and note who received it.
How many people should have the login?
As many as need it, each with an account of their own. The number is not the risk. Sharing is. One account per person means access ends the day somebody leaves, and on the platform I install the system can tell you who viewed or exported a clip. A shared password does neither, and it outlives everybody who knew it.
Where I Would Start
Pick your largest building and time one clip this week. Thirty seconds from the parking deck, from a Tuesday afternoon. That exercise tells you how many logins you have, whether the camera is still working, whether anybody would have noticed if it were not, and what your tenants get when they ask.
If it comes back slow, or empty, or on a USB stick, cloud video surveillance is worth a look, and it starts with the cameras already on your walls. If you are not sure which of the three you have, or what would carry over, call us at 678-924-7480 or get in touch here.
Current as of September 2026. We review this post annually.
Scott Hightower founded Verified Security in 2007 and has spent nearly two decades designing, installing, and servicing commercial security systems across metro Atlanta. Verified Security is an authorized Honeywell security provider and specializes in access control, video surveillance, intrusion, and fire alarm systems. Reach Scott’s team at 678-924-7480.