These days, it is very important to protect both yourself, your customers, and your business as best as possible. Knowing that your business is safe even when you are not there is a peace of mind that cannot be easily obtained. One of the easiest ways to achieve that level of security is through a surveillance system. With one, you can have surveillance over every single customer and employee that goes through your office or building. It’s not just about protecting yourself from thieves, employees and clients may be the cause of a problem too.
However, many people avoid the idea of installing such a system because it seems expensive and too complicated. But, that is not true, it is not. Obtaining this such a system for your office or your home is easier than ever and it is not even that expensive anymore. This is one of the main reasons why so many people have cameras in their own backyard.
But, just because cameras can be bought for cheap and they can be easily installed, does not mean that this process is simple. If you are determined to install a video surveillance system for your business, you will need to ensure that you spend the money in the right place and you will also have to follow through the installation process too.
To help you, I am writing this guide with a couple of tips to give you a good idea of how the installation will go and which devices you should pick.
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Placement of the cameras
One of the first and most important steps of this entire process is to determine where the cameras will be located. This will determine just how effective your surveillance system will be. You cannot just pick the locations randomly because that might lead to areas that are not covered by the vision of the camera. To truly maximize the effectiveness and to save them money, you will need to properly analyze the office spaces.
However, if you truly want to do this properly, I would recommend hiring a professional that will be able to tell you the best parts for installing these devices. By hiring professional services such as titusalarmandcctv, they can surely maximize the effectiveness of every single camera you buy.
The budget
Of course, when it comes to installing these types of systems for your business, you probably have to spend a couple hundred or thousand dollars. This will be cheaper, but considering what is at stake here, it is definitely worth it.
The quality of the system you install will be determined by your budget. This is why it is essential to determine just how large your budget will be. The more money you have to spend, the higher quality of cameras you will be able to set up and an even better monitoring system for higher security.
For example, if your offices are quite large, you will probably need cameras with higher resolution and with the ability to zoom in. The higher resolutions will give you the ability to inspect the content properly.
Wiring
You have determined where all of your cameras will be placed in which ones you are going to buy, so your next step is to determine how you’re going to deal with the wire routing problem. Usually, most office buildings leave enough space for this type of upgrades in the walls. Suppose your business is in one of these buildings that have the ability to install this type of wiring, great. If not, things may get a little bit more complicated.
You have two options, you could either route the wires across the entire room, or you could settle for wireless cameras. I know, you might think that wireless technology is still not there yet, but these new wireless surveillance systems are actually quite impressive. They work just as well as wired surveillance and some even better.
Video footage storage
This is a very important part of every video surveillance system that many people forget about. Think about how many cameras you are going to install or how many you already have. Is it one, is it two, five, or maybe even 10? Well, imagine that all of those 10 devices are working constantly 24/7. They are constantly recording new content every single day and that content will have to be stored somewhere.
However, depending on the resolution quality, the content can be huge. Some systems work through hundreds of gigabytes every single day. This means that your storage needs to be at least several terabytes big, especially if you want to keep that video footage for more than a month.
Unfortunately, hard disk drives and solid-state drives are still very expensive when it comes to large storage. Hard disk drives with 4 TB of storage or higher can be priced over $150. I think it is safe to say that with 10 cameras, you will probably need at least 10 of these HDDs. That is a lot of money.
But, there is one solution to this storage problem, which is much more convenient and cheaper too. Cloud storage is a thing, and it is widely accepted by even the biggest companies in the world, such as Facebook or Google. For just $100 or $150 a month, you could get up to 50 TB of storage, which is several times more than what you could get when trying to build physical storage in your offices.
Remote access
One of the best things about these modern video surveillance systems is the fact that you can oversee what is going on in your business from anywhere you want. Just by dominating an application on your phone, you could easily get access to the cameras installed in your office. You can use this application when your home, while you’re in your car or even when you are on vacation.
As you can see, with the right knowledge and with enough effort, installing a video surveillance system for your business is not that difficult, nor expensive, so it is definitely worth it.
