Data Center

Local Agencies Look to the Right Video Storage Solution for Their Environments

To access surveillance footage, public sector institutions may go on-premises or to the cloud.

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Erin Brereton has written about technology, business and other topics for more than 50 magazines, newspapers and online publications.

Lewiston, Maine, has used surveillance cameras to monitor parking garages, municipal buildings and other facilities since the 1980s, says Craig Starr, the city’s IT director.

Currently, most of Lewiston’s 377 cameras — primarily Axis Communications models — record footage 24 hours a day in the city.

Data from Lewiston’s surveillance cameras was housed on network-attached storage devices that required replacement every seven years. In 2024, however, the city began streaming video via its dark fiber network to an on-premises, 400-terabyte all-flash storage array from Pure Storage that offers ample space. The data is automatically deleted after 30 days.

By providing regular software and hardware upgrades, Pure Storage’s subscription has also helped Lewiston avoid costly equipment overhauls, Starr says.

“That gives us the ability to have them come in three years and replace all of our hardware so it doesn’t go end-of-life on us,” he says. “As long as we maintain the support plan, they replace it with zero downtime. That’s very attractive to us.”

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Expanded cellular and Wi-Fi capabilities have made streaming surveillance camera data more common in recent years, says Marc Pfeiffer, associate director of the Bloustein Local Government Research Center, part of the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University.

“Places have installed more fiber-optic networks over the years. You can tie these remote devices in so you aren’t paying cellular or hardwired circuit charges. That lets users create local Wi-Fi nodes and move the data from there,” Pfeiffer says.

Cloud storage isn’t the ideal fit for every municipality; Lewiston, for instance, chose an on-premises option because the city couldn’t find a cloud provider able to fulfill the recording speed rate requirements to stream its camera data, Starr says.

A number of hardware vendors have introduced Storage as a Service elements, Pfeiffer says, which could potentially help state and local governments simplify video data administration.

“You can buy cameras, pay for them over a number of years and get storage along with it,” he says.

As long as we maintain the support plan, they replace it with zero downtime. That’s very attractive to us.”

Craig Starr Lewiston, Maine's IT Director, Craig Starr

Sometimes Cloud Is Best for Video Storage

Before Edinburg, Texas, installed its current Verkada camera and video management system in 2019, sustaining the city’s multiple digital and network video recorder surveillance camera systems — and the associated storage — fell under its small IT department’s responsibilities.

“It’s challenging managing traditional surveillance systems with just on-prem servers,” says IT Director Danny Vera. “My IT team was just two or three people. It was more beneficial for us to move toward a hybrid system.”

Vera was particularly interested in the Verkada solution’s low bandwidth consumption. To date, Edinburg has added more than 200 fish-eye, point-tilt-zoom and other individually licensed cameras from the company, in and outside of city buildings. These are primarily hardwired to switches within the structures.

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The average number of surveillance cameras per 1,000 people in the 50 most-populated U.S. cities

Source: comparitech.com, “CCTV surveillance in the most populated cities in the United States,” Jan. 8, 2024

Encrypted, compressed video data is typically kept for 30 days, per state guidelines, on both the camera devices (which offer 256 gigabytes of internal storage) and in the cloud. Departments can download any information they need to retain for a longer period.

Edinburg has also outfitted portable solar-powered trailers with Verkada cameras and Cradlepoint routers that provide a cellular modem connection, Vera says. The city’s police department uses these to obtain coverage in more remote spots, such as public parks that aren’t connected to Edinburg’s Wi-Fi network.

“We’ve tried traditional CCTV cameras, but retrieving video was a hassle, and because of data consumption, pricing increased as we used the cameras,” he says. “Verkada’s cameras can run on a very low internet connection, and the cellular connections we have for those cameras don’t affect our data plan.”

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Accessing Data With Cloud

Muhlenberg County Public Libraries previously relied on local surveillance camera storage for its three locations in Greenville and Central City, Ky.

To retrieve video data, System Administrator Luke Waltrip had to physically trek to the building where it had been recorded to pull footage from the camera.

Losing information if data discs were stolen in a break-in was a risk, Waltrip says. Plus, to ensure video was recorded and saved, a continuous source of electricity was required at each location, which wasn’t always guaranteed.

Since 2018, the library system has instead used Verkada dome cameras connected to Power over Ethernet switches. The cameras have a battery that can act as an additional power supply, if needed. Data is stored on each camera for 30 days and is also sent to the cloud.

“A fair number of tornados come through this area,” Waltrip says. “We lose power fairly regularly. You could have an outage for several hours and still be able to record locally. Then, once we reconnect to power or the internet, it starts to upload to the cloud again.”

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The video management system’s data storage and artificial intelligence features have aided in investigating vandalism and other incidents; for example, Waltrip can ask the system when a specific object changed — such as a telephone pole that was knocked over during the night — and it will provide the footage of the incident occurring.

“I don’t have to rewind,” he says. “There’s no scrolling through video like before. With the old system, if you didn’t know when something happened, you would have to watch a lot of recorded footage.”

Waltrip now gives law enforcement members a code, which expires at a set time, that lets them easily view video evidence in the system.

“We had some graffiti recently, and police were given two-week access to the footage,” he says. “If there is a security incident in one of the buildings, I can instantly share the video with them so they have live footage of the facility.”

On-Premises vs. Cloud

As cities and states continue to add video surveillance, body-worn cameras, drones and other safety-oriented technology, their data storage needs will likely grow.

Some may address the demand with an on-premises solution — which is fine, says Pfeiffer, if they have the staffing and time to handle the corresponding tasks. These include:

Determining how many servers are needed
Keeping servers updated
Managing authorized access
Instituting cybersecurity controls

“Some would prefer to outsource it to third party such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon or other cloud service provider, whoever you bring in to do those things,” he says. “Backups can be automated, drives can be monitored remotely, and when they see a potential failure, those systems can lift the data and put it on another one. But there’s a cost; you pay for it by the gigabyte or terabyte.”

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