Surveillance Cameras for your Business (Podcast)

Explore the latest in surveillance camera technology on this Tech Tuesday episode. Joined by PCG CEO Dave Hodgdon and Senior Engineer Patrick Nichols, dive into the evolving landscape of security cameras, discussing advancements, business applications, and integration with IT systems. Learn how PCG can help implement a comprehensive surveillance solution for enhanced security.

John Maher:     Welcome to Tech Tuesday, brought to you by PCG, a managed services and security provider in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I’m John Maher, and with me today from PCG is CEO and founder Dave Hodgdon. Welcome, Dave.

Dave Hodgdon: Welcome, John. Always a pleasure. We love Tech Tuesdays.

John:    Absolutely. We have a special guest today, Patrick Nichols, also from PCG, the senior engineer heading the surveillance and security camera team. Welcome, Patrick.

Patrick Nichols: Thank you, John.

How Has Surveillance Camera Technology Evolved?

John:    Absolutely. So today we are talking about surveillance cameras. Dave, maybe you could provide us with a little bit of an overview of the current state of surveillance camera technology and how it’s evolved in recent years.

Dave:   Yeah, John, we’re finding this particular segment, or what we call a solution, has grown dramatically. The security cameras have been out there for a long time. You’ll see them in a lot of department stores, above cash registers, larger type buildings, just looking for some unusual activity. But since the COVID thing happened, there appears to be a huge increase in demand for what’s going on, not only from an HR standpoint, from maybe owning someone’s assets, to what’s going on with more people remote.

So, the ability to kind of monitor your building your assets there. The ability from an HR standpoint, which is huge, John, to do that, and the technology has changed dramatically from some of these cameras in the old days were very expensive. Patrick will be talking [about that]. These new IP cameras are pretty cool, very cost-effective. We have many types of cameras depending on what you’re looking to solve, whether it’s inside, outside, directly looking at a particular item, or more of a larger degree look.

But the whole surveillance thing we’re finding is probably one of the top segments that companies are looking to do, and PCG is put a lot of efforts into the technology to solve it. And how you go about doing it, John, it really starts at each business a little bit different. What are they trying to accomplish, what do they want to see, why do they want to see it, for how long do they want to see it, where are the locations they want to put it? And the location is key to the assessment, which Patrick will talk about; you’re going to have wiring there. But we’re finding the surveillance system is a great topic for us to talk about and we’re excited.

What Are Surveillance Cameras For?

John:    And in general, Dave, are we talking about surveillance cameras in order to help with the security of your business from break-ins and things like that? Or are we talking about checking up on our employees or … What’s the point of installing a surveillance system?

Dave:   Great question John, but a lot of it’s definitely your building security. So what’s going on outside the building, cars, you might have inventory in your vehicles in these days, you might have motion detectors inside, but these cameras are really helping you, which is going to help on your business insurance.

So what’s going on outside my building but also inside my building. You’ve seen many incidents in the news that someone’s coming into a building or shop, and some form of theft or some type of aggravation happens to a person at the front desk. We’re not here to personally just look at people and what’s going on, but what’s going on in my inventory room, what’s happening when people come and go? Is someone leaving in the inventory room or going outside with particular products? So it’s not only to protect your assets, but I think a big part from HR, which is huge today, it’s what is going on should someone say, “I slipped and fell”? Well, I have you on camera here, you didn’t slip and fall. So I see many, many benefits there, John.

Balancing Security and Privacy with Surveillance Cameras

John:    Okay. So, Patrick, obviously privacy concerns are often raised in the context of surveillance cameras. How can businesses strike a balance between security and privacy when they’re using surveillance technology?

Patrick: So the one thing I tell all of my clients that are implementing some of this, I tell them, “Hey, we’ve got the ability to record audio, but I don’t recommend it.” In a lot of states, you actually get permission from people each time audio is being recorded or write it into their employment agreement.

But honestly, you’re not getting that much more data and the level of privacy that people feel is being invaded by cameras that are also recording audio goes up significantly. The amount of benefit to the audio is going to be fairly minimal and it’s just going to take up more space in your storage and make it so you have less room for more storage in terms of the number of days you can hold onto that data.

John:    A common argument against surveillance cameras might be, “Hey, I trust my employees, so what’s the point? I don’t really need surveillance cameras.”

Patrick: So it honestly depends on the application. So in terms of a manufacturing environment, I’ve got clients that use it to check up on the machines that are supposed to be doing their job autonomously and the clients come to me and said, “Hey, can you pull the footage for this date”? And I show them how to do it and he’s able to provide that to the vendor that he buys this manufacturing equipment from and say, “Hey, it’s malfunctioning in this way, can you come fix it”? So it’s not necessarily … we’re not always looking at what people are doing. You’re looking at what equipment’s doing, you’re looking at what customers are doing and, in the sense of in a customer service environment, you might use it to support your employees.

Say a customer comes in claiming that you did this to them or you didn’t return their product to them in a correct state, you can use it and say, no, we’ve got that on footage. We know how our employees acted with you. We can verify it if you’d like to provide the footage to the police, we can certainly do that if it escalates to that end. But it’s all about capturing incidents when they happen and being able to support what actually happened. So if that’s supporting your employees, if they did things correctly, that’s protecting your business. If an employee acted incorrectly in the case, it becomes an HR issue at that point.

Dave:   John, I also feel I agree with you about there was always some pushback. I trust my employees. Privacy comes into place. I think if you want to have a safe working place, we have this in place so you guys feel safe. If there’s an issue, we want to deal with it. So from a culture standpoint, it’s not about, and as long as they know it’s not about me just watching what you’re doing, it’s more about should something happen — I’ve gotten alerts that there’s an animal in here that’s causing certain motion detection, then you just kind of see, “oh, it’s a little mouse running around”

But on a weekend, it’s nice to know if something’s going on. One of our employees is out in the parking lot and someone else came in and parked, hit his car. So at that point, we had the footage that the guy says, “no, I didn’t hit your car”. He says, “no, we have footage that you hit the car”. So I think it comes in to really help have people feel safer in their environment. It’s not particularly picking on you.

John:    And so is that how you would approach it with employees when you let them know, “Hey, by the way, we’re going to install surveillance cameras or we’re considering installing surveillance cameras”. Do you approach the employees and say, “look, we’re doing this for you just to make sure that everybody here is safe”, whether it’s from potential angry customers or the customers who, like you said, might be lying and saying, “no, I didn’t hit your car”, or “no, I got my product back in this bad state, it was broken when you gave it to me”, or something like that? Is that how you would approach your employees?

Dave:   It’s not our job to, if we’re being asked to put it in a place, that really needs to come from that company, this is what we’re doing, this is why we’re doing it, and they need to explain it. I’m sure they’re going to be asking, “Patrick, why are you putting that in my area”? But I mean, it’s on them to say, “this is why we’ve given the advice to the C-level to why they need to do it. They’re coming to us for a compliance reason, which is big for cameras”. As Patrick used that example of the machine shop, there’s certain things that have to be monitored if you’re doing X amount of work for defense or for the military, for the government; certain things have to be monitored in order to be compliant. So a lot of it is reasoned within the building, not necessarily to do with the people, but that is definitely a 100% initiative on the ownership of them needing to know why.

Patrick: In that sense too, it acts as a deterrent. For instance, I finished an install in a warehouse environment where there’s forklift drivers going all over the place and they know that they’re not supposed to be on their phones while they’re driving the forklifts, going around corners blindly. They’re supposed to have their lights on that show if they’re reversing or going forward. But it also is the responsibility of everybody else that’s traversing through the warehouse that the forklifts, they’ve got the right-of-way pretty much everywhere. If you’re in their way, they’re going to stop. But if you jump out from around a corner, that’s on you. And knowing that if I was a forklift driver in that space, I’d know that if I’m doing my job correctly, and it truly isn’t my fault, my boss is going to know that and he’s going to support me.

Cybersecurity and Surveillance Camera Systems

John:    Okay. Cybersecurity is obviously a significant concern for any kind of IT-related technology. How can organizations ensure the security of their surveillance camera systems?

Dave:   In today’s world, John, we follow the NIST that it kind of follows. The thing is of you’re detecting, you’re protecting, so you’re kind of following the protection side we’re protecting, but we’re also hitting the big one, detecting if something’s right or wrong. So from a cybersecurity standpoint, we’re hitting the areas of what NIST is looking to do. So many people in the compliance that we talked about, if you’re doing work in the military, DOD, you have to follow CMMC or DFARS. You actually are following the process that they want and those now are actually part, when you’re doing your checkoff, when say you’re doing your cyber insurance checkoff with Travelers, Chubb, Lloyds of London, Hanover, those are questions you’re being asked there. And now, with 100% confidence, I can check off that we are following that process, which is helping us, not only financially, but also to help get the business that we need.

Patrick: And Dave, to follow up on that too, a lot of the more consumer-grade or entry-level surveillance systems will ask you to open a port on your firewall so you can get remote access to it. All the solutions that we provide, provide an encrypted cloud connection that is much more secure. You can get down to the permissions levels of each person that has access to it, so these people have access to view it, these people have access to download clips, these people have access to delete clips or add new cameras, things like that. Really getting down to your access control and making sure that only the people that should have access, have access to it.

John:    So, Dave, are you saying that surveillance and camera systems can actually help with your cyber insurance policy?

Dave:   Absolutely, John, with those checkboxes I mentioned earlier. So in today’s role, cyber assurance, I know when we first got ours, the amount it’s going up at is 10, 15, 25, 35%. So the more you, as your business, can kind of follow the checklist of what they’re looking to do, to put in place, it’s still going up, but you’re not going up at the rate or percentages of someone that doesn’t have that in place.

And the key thing is you’re following that NIST, you’re following the protect and detect, which is now helping you, whether it’s HR or something to do with your client or your environment that someone has affected, that someone’s trying to hurt somebody at the front desk or take money at the cash drawer, you’re kind of helping everything, to help with the police, with the insurance who have all the information needed at your fingertips.

John:    Patrick, what are cloud-based or IP-based surveillance systems? So how do they work?

Patrick: So, typically, it means that your cameras are either connected over Wi-Fi or, more preferably, over an ethernet cable, and they’re being provided power from your network devices so you don’t have to run separate data and power cables or run extra electrical circuits in your building. It’s all low voltage wire so you don’t need a specialized electrician to install it, but they work, in the sense that you’ve got a kind of central control unit, whether that is on-premise or in the cloud, that monitors and records the streams from each individual camera. And because you’ve got kind of a smart device there, most of the systems can do things like smart detections, like detecting if there’s a person in the area versus if there’s a vehicle in the area, can do motion detection, but then because it’s a smart cloud-connected device, it can also send you push notifications to your phone or your email saying, “somebody’s in the back room of your restaurant where your safe is at three in the morning and your restaurant closed at 5:00 PM the previous day”, or something like that.

Getting those notifications and being able to set those schedules provides the business owner and the managers a level of comfort knowing that if something’s going on, they’re going to know about it and they’re going to be able to quickly see what’s going on without having to actually drive in and see, “oh, I’m missing a few thousand dollars from the safe. What happened?”

Types of Surveillance Cameras

John:    So, what are some of the different types of cameras that are available and what would be the business use for each one of them?

Patrick: Yeah. So the main difference in cameras are outdoor-rated ones versus indoor-rated ones. We obviously provide solutions for both. Many of them have different fields of view, so if you want to get a wide angle, one that mounts flush against a wall, or if you want to get something that has a 360 field of view that you mount up on a ceiling. There’s plenty of fisheye cameras, but what’s cool about the systems we use is that the clips that are taken from them kind of reorient the picture so you don’t have to look at it in the fisheye view. It’ll do some kind of image manipulation to make it. So if a car drives by and you get that clip of them driving right into your office, it’ll be able to show you the angle of them actually coming in without having to see, “oh that’s really small, on the right side of this clip here”. It’ll do a smart zoom-and-crop for you.

John:    So, it’s capturing the whole 360-degree view. But then when you’re looking at the final video, it tracks the motion across like a normal video as if you had a camera that was moving left and right?

Patrick: Correct. Yeah, 360 cameras are kind of new to the space. Your more traditional ones are either a dome or a bullet camera, but then we’ve also got ones that will integrate with access control. Things like, whether it’s a doorbell or a door card reader where you might use it to unlock and lock your front door to your business or the employee entrance. You can have cameras integrated in that. So every time somebody swipes in, it takes a quick clip of who’s swiping in, who else are they letting in, so you’ve got a better idea of what’s happening and you can set up automations to get alerts for things like that as well, all integrated into one system.

Dave:   John, we find a lot of that on the type of cameras Patrick was going over. It really is the business case scenario. So as you’re doing the surveillance assessment, he talked about the dome, when you go to these grocery stores you can see the cameras.

And then a lot of times you’re outside, you kind of see more of that bullet one that’s focused on one thing. So a lot of times above a cash drawer, and you’ll see this camera looking directly at the person, what’s going on there. You can’t go into manufacturing and have all these aisles of rows of stacked up equipment. A dome is not going to be able to view between those aisles. So you need to know what they want to look at and then that’ll dictate whether it’s the dome, it’s the 360, it’s the bullet.

In a lot of environments, it’s a mixture of all three of those cameras based upon what they’re trying to do. As Patrick said earlier, is it an indoor-rated or an outdoor camera? So in a lot of environments we have like 8 to 20 cameras and they’re all over the board from indoor, outdoor and the type, it’s really, “what do I want to capture at that particular location?”

Power Over Ethernet Cameras

John:    What is a POE camera and what are some of the benefits and advantages of that?

Patrick: So POE stands for power over ethernet. So things like, in your traditional environments, your VoIP phones might be powered over ethernet. Your wireless access points might be powered over ethernet. The advantage of having cameras that are powered over ethernet is, like I mentioned earlier, it’s all low voltage. So your IT company, your IT person can run the cable themselves. It’s just normal Cat5 or Cat6 cable, and they can terminate that. There’s no requirements to have it in a metal box and have that metal box be grounded properly and everything like that. Obviously, we do encourage, if it’s especially in an outdoor environment, putting in things like POE surge protectors, which are generally sold with the outdoor-rated cameras already.

But things like that make it easier to power and also to reboot the cameras. I can remotely access the managed network switch that they’re plugged into and I can reboot individual cameras or all of the cameras, all at once. It makes it easier for troubleshooting and understanding where your data is and who’s able to access it because you can isolate that network specifically for just your cameras.

Dave:   And John, the other big thing on the POE, as Patrick was saying, is think about that ethernet; it’s so much easier than hiring an electrician to put in an electrical outlet. So as we’re saying, the power’s coming from the ethernet cable, Cat5e preferred, or Cat6, so once you know where they want them to be, having an electrician doesn’t make sense at all. But the key to that is coming back to the assessment – how many cameras, how many access points, how many phones are coming back to this box that you call the POE switch?

That switch has so much wattage to drive. The average phone is about 7.5 watts, camera 7-8 watts. So you’ve got to take the full measure of everything you have, and then you want to have some overage there. So when I put the switch in place, it has the ability to power each one of these. And you can get inexpensive switches POE, but they only can put two or three devices on. So it’s very important that the infrastructure is…the key part of this is how many cameras, that’s going to dictate your wiring runs, that’ll dictate the POE switch. And then, as we’ll talk about, the DVR is another key part to this.

HR and Surveillance Systems

John:    Dave, can you talk a little bit about some of the business advantages of a surveillance system from an HR human resources point of view?

Dave:   I just feel John, from everything we’re speaking about, and we actually had an event yesterday, we spoke to a human resources group, and the majority of them are embracing it. They want to know if there’s an employee issue. They want to know if there’s something to do with a client coming to them, or a prospect, or someone is making an acquisition, that they want to protect their staff. There could be a scenario that someone is doing something that they shouldn’t be doing. These are things you don’t want to think about your staff, but these security cameras, from an HR standpoint, are really giving them the information so that they actually can make a good decision, verses one person said it and another person said it another way.

I don’t know if you’ve seen some of those ads recently. I think it’s fantastic that they do the instant replay. You’ve got a husband or wife talking about something, the person comes in with it, they throw the red flag, they look at the surveillance, and then I think it’s just funny you kind of embrace, it’s nice to have the information right in front of you.

Integrating Surveillance Cameras with Other IT Systems

John:    Patrick, in what ways can surveillance cameras be integrated with other IT systems such as access control or alarm systems in order to create a comprehensive security ecosystem?

Patrick: The big thing about them is remote access. Dave mentioned a DVR. DVR is the old-style analog cameras getting recorded and that you may or may not have remote access to that, but we deal with our network video recorders and because they are, by default, connected to the network, you’re able to connect those with cloud services. You’re able to integrate them with, a lot of times within the same brand, the same ecosystem, things like door access.

We use that internally here. So making sure nobody’s entering the building at a time or entering the inventory room. We shouldn’t be at a certain time where we’re unescorted. That’s something we do internally, but we think that’s a great idea for businesses, as well, that either have different security levels for whether or not you have to meet DoD security standards or if it’s a medical environment. Maybe you’ve got a difference in people that are able to access a room that might have controlled substances in it versus people that are just there as administrative or billing staff or things like that.

And it’s not about whether or not they’re allowed to be in the room with that stuff. It’s the…well, you’re also protecting the employee, saying if something comes up here, those employees that don’t have access, and you’ve got record of not asking, those employees are protected because they’re not even able to enter that room. Based on your door access control and your surveillance that you’ve got set up, you can verify, “hey, they didn’t go in there, they’re clear.” We can move on to, well, maybe it was a vendor that was in here delivering products or if, unfortunately, sometimes it is an employee that does have access and you have to be careful of that.

John:    Yeah, like you said, it’s just as much for the protection of the employees as it is to try to find someone who’s not acting in the proper way. Being able to prove that your employees didn’t have anything to do with it is just as important.

Patrick: Exactly.

How Can an IT Company like PCG Help?

John:    Dave, how can an IT company like PCG help another company to implement a surveillance system and why would it be important to reach out to an IT company like yourself as opposed to maybe trying to do it themselves?

Dave:   Because we have Patrick. [Laughter] So from a standpoint of we’ve been kind of playing at the earliest stages, seven, eight years ago, but it’s changed dramatically that a lot of times there was these other surveillance camera companies that do this stuff, but the technology has changed, John, so much.

Just like in your home environment, you see people now with the Ring doorbell, what you can do and through this whole IP on ethernet, it’s really becoming part of your network, John. So whether it’s your wireless, it’s your surveillance, it’s your phones, it’s now all coming down running on the network, which as a company is what we do. So we understand the network, we know the questions to ask, we know to be part of the assessment just like you do a network assessment or a wireless assessment or if you’re going to do an application assessment that the key thing, when you come down to it, is you’ve got to ask the right questions, you’ve got to know the right products that are going to fit that solution.

You have to be able to do the wiring, but the final piece is you got to be able to train them and support it once it’s in place. So from a company like PCG, we have all those arms around the wheel; we have the ability to do the assessment, understand they need to put the right cameras, you just don’t want to put bullets all over the place. It might not be getting the information that you want. So as we do this, we’ve evolved on our practice right here. We’ve gotten very good at it, and we’ve seen, I would say we probably did three or four surveillance installations last year. We’re probably up to 20 this year.

So we’re seeing a trend, John, that companies want this in place. They don’t have to have the full building covered, but it’s not that expensive to get the core in place, add the cameras you need now that you’re really worried about, they see the value, they’re using it. I just love any day knowing that while I’m away, or on a weekend when there’s bad weather, sometimes…we live on the side of the hill with a lot of trees. I like to know just to look out there, the cars aren’t hit, the building’s okay, hey, it looks like something is going on, my tenant says what’s going on, the lights aren’t on. I can clearly see. So from a standpoint of just feeling safe, secure, it’s that extra level, this makes you feel good.

Patrick: To piggyback on that, Dave, there’s the aspect of if we’re already up there running wire, it’s a great time to do a wireless upgrade, maybe to implement some door access things because it’s only so much more to pull an extra couple hundred feet of Cat6 cable and mount a few access points to improve the wireless coverage for your office too. So if you’re doing the wiring anyways, you really want to consider all of the wiring you have to do because you can save some cost there.

Dave:   It’s just like when you’re doing your house, you do an upgrade, you’re going to add a new addition to your house, you’re looking everywhere, I want my outlets here, it’s the same thing. I want to have coverage where I want, you don’t want to do it after it’s done. So kind of just what Patrick said, get it done right, and it’s easy to grow from there.

John:    All right. Well, that’s great information guys. Patrick, thanks for joining us today.

Patrick: Thank you.

John:    And Dave, as always, great to talk to you.

Dave:   We love Tech Tuesday. Have a great day.

John:    Absolutely, you too. And for more information, visit the PCG website at pcgit.com or call 603-431-4121.