Security Cameras for Small Businesses

Keeping your business protected and secure is always a top priority. Business owners always go the extra mile when it comes to ensuring the security and safety of their investment. For your business to be profitable, it’s imperative to protect your assets. Thus, hunting for the best local business surveillance systems is a must.

Safeguard Your Business

Aside from a reliable IT system that can safeguard your business from identity thieves, hackers, and crooks, you also need to increase the security of your physical premises. Therefore, consider installing a video surveillance equipment.

Video surveillance systems come in multiple types of cameras and digital recorders. They also store the video files for future use and review. Today’s surveillance systems also allow you to watch the video feed remotely through any mobile device.

What’s more, the technology that is involved in business surveillance systems is more intuitive and practical than ever. Additionally, since every business has its own unique set of security demands, video systems allow for a high degree of customization.

Today’s post will talk about how to choose the right security camera for your business.

The Benefits

Before we talk about the factors to consider and things to look out for, let’s tackle the benefits of a local business surveillance systems installation. Apart from helping deter crimes and aiding police officers in identifying suspects, these systems can improve employee accountability, help monitor productivity, and even reduce insurance costs. The upfront one-time installation cost may be costly, but the long-term benefit of having peace of mind and security makes it a worthy investment.

Cameras: IP or Analog

Internet Protocol (IP) cameras are the modern replication of analog cameras. While they may be a little more costly, IP cameras have features that traditional analog cameras don’t. Let’s identify more criteria that will let us make comparisons between IP and analog cameras.

Resolution

IP cameras can shoot footages of between one and five megapixels, which can produce incredibly clear and high-quality images. On the other hand, analog cameras produce somewhat grainy footage, since it can only run around one and one-half megapixels. IP cameras also have a wider field of vision compared to analog.

Video Analytics and Network Video Recorders

Video analytics are an added feature of IP Cameras. It enables instant mobile notifications and automatic recording if the camera detects any movement within its field of vision. This feature works exceptionally well when your business is closed for the day, and you want to know if there is any movement within the premises. You can set up the system to identify these occurrences and send alerts to your mobile device, accompanied by the recorded footage. Video analytics configurations also provide a direct connection to your local police. Analog cameras don’t offer video analytics. Moreover, IP cameras have compatibility with network video recorders (NVR). NVR’s provide benefits such as higher-quality video recording in easily scalable formats.

PoE Switches

Power over Ethernet (PoE) enables you to send data from the camera as well as supply power to it. You can connect IP cameras through PoE switches, which is a more secure way to transmit and transfer data and files. On the other hand, analog cameras are more complex and require a separate power source and a switch to communicate the signal.

Cost Comparison

With IP cameras’ extra and user-friendly features, the cost is more expensive than the analog ones. However, the price of a full IP system can be cheaper than the analog system counterpart. Additionally, IP cameras have a broader scope of vision; they require fewer camera units than analog.

Choosing a System

Cameras

Resolutions, frame rate, models, indoor and outdoor usability, lighting, and audio. These factors are the essentials you need to consider when it comes to choosing a camera for your system. It all comes down to evaluating what you and your business require. For instance, if your business mainly operates outdoors, get security cameras that can withstand natural forces without sacrificing image quality or worse, breaking and damaging the unit.

Video Recorders

Video recording system with multiple cameras

The factors we mentioned above for choosing a camera can also be applied when it comes to picking a video recorder to include in your local business surveillance systems. The other important considerations are what their storage capacities and compression abilities are. Try to determine how much storage you will need, how many cameras you will be using, and how much footages and how long you intend to store them. If you have multiple cameras shooting high-res images, the storage space will be used faster. There is also an option to overwrite the oldest video footage once the storage limit is reached. However, be careful when setting this option up because you wouldn’t want to remove archived footage that you will still need.

This is where compression comes in. Compressing files allows erasing unnecessary data transmitted to your video recorder so you can save space. H.264 and MJPEG are compression techniques you can use. Since compression methods tend to be complex depending on their applications and hardware are, we will delve into the details about video compression and how it relates to local business surveillance systems in a future post.