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Case study

Fast, Concurrent Access to Surveillance Video in the Cloud

Industry: State, Local, and Education (SLED)
Case Study: Illinois School District District 128

Safeguarding the wellbeing of students and staff is a primary concern for schools today. With safety a top priority, video surveillance systems are integral to any school’s security. Community High School District 128 (D128) has long relied on a fleet of security cameras to secure its campuses and was using Milestone XProtect® Systems and local storage to manage and retain video data. But with more than 3,000 students, daily after-school activities, and 24/7 monitoring, the district was quickly outgrowing its video data storage capacity.

D128’s dilemma is universal, not just in schools but across all industries that use video surveillance—from retail and restaurants to transportation, government, and more. Today’s 4K cameras produce eight times more data than a 1080p camera, which over-taxes the capacity and bandwidth of current video storage infrastructures. Like D128, many organizations are looking for cost-effective, agile cloud solutions to enable massive data storage and multiple-location access to video footage.

Business Challenge

Video surveillance has rigid data storage and retention requirements. D128 was running short of storage space & budget. D128 needed a scalable solution to reduce costs while maintaining on-demand access to file-based systems.

Solution

According to IT Manager, at D128, Temple Murphy, “LucidLink fits the bill because it’s a pay as you go solution that doesn’t require a major software or hardware change on our end.” LucidLink Filespaces is a high-performance cloud-native file service that enables video data to be stored and accessed directly from affordable, scalable object storage, whether in the cloud or on-premises. Using Filespaces as if it were local storage, archived video is always available immediately for viewing by individuals or by multiple people at the same time, regardless of their location. Filespaces even supports video surveillance software that is not natively compatible with object storage, which means older video archives can also be accessed on-demand from anywhere. And there is no time limit on how long customers can keep video files. Filespaces is ideal for distributed workflows, remote teams that collaborate across common data sets, and companies that need to provide secure data access to video assets regardless of file size or where the data is stored.

D128 started with an initial test implementation on one recording server to see how Filespaces would interact within its system. Murphy discovered LucidLink on a Friday and ran his initial test over the weekend, looking for any potential issues with latency and connectivity, but found none. By Monday, Murphy was ready to install Filespaces system-wide, and by Wednesday, Filespaces was up and running across the district.

“The simple installation GUI made it easy to try out and demonstrate,” Murphy noted. “The command-line tools are rather intuitive as well, so using OS-based triggering tools such as Task Scheduler or cron makes it simple to manage.” Filespaces provides a single mount point as a local drive letter for all applications, so it worked seamlessly with D128’s Milestone VMS. “The best thing about LucidLink,” said Murphy, “is that we can leverage our existing VMS tools. Once we realized success with our VMS, it became apparent that we could use Filespaces for our Veeam backup solution too.”

Results

With LucidLink, D128 does not worry about security—physical or cyber. The district is now well equipped with a cost-effective, highly-scalable, and safe repository for its video data, and users have immediate access to footage anywhere within the district. Already, over the last several months, D128 has increased its LucidLink usage five times. With LucidLink, D128 benefits from:

milestone object storage

Summary

Like any organization that depends on video surveillance to protect its assets, D128 views immediate and seamless access to video data as paramount. As D128 has discovered, Filespaces provides high reliability and availability to meet the demands of video surveillance deployments, including high-definition and megapixel environments.

D128 was up and running with LucidLink in a matter of days, using their existing VMS tool, Milestone XProtect. Operators and the end-users were able to retrieve video surveillance footage without enlisting IT staff for set-up or support. Once Filespaces was in place, the system operated as if it were a local drive, making it intuitive and fast to access. Murphy and his team no longer had to spend time making or changing virtual tapes, or moving devices around to optimize storage, etc.

And while security is most everyone’s top concern these days, LucidLink delivers sophisticated end-to-end, “zero-knowledge” encryption, so an immutable object cannot be deleted or modified by anyone—including any object store—ensuring video footage is never altered or destroyed.

“LucidLink’s zero-knowledge encryption model where only the customers hold the encryption keys combined with built-in transit and at-rest encryption was a big selling point. Any vendor who didn’t offer that level of security would likely have been off the table for us,” explained Murphy. With LucidLink, you can “check the box” for security.

The district is now well equipped to access surveillance video from anywhere. Looking to the future, LucidLink will continue to deliver innovative solutions to customers like D128 and others, including businesses, government agencies, and managed service providers—any organization that wants to enhance productivity, reduce costs, improve security, and accelerate cloud data access.

About D128

Ranked #1 as the state’s safest district by Niche 2019 Community High School District 128, north of Chicago, D128 has long relied on video surveillance for security.

https://www.d128.org/

SaaS offering, no hardware or IT support required

End-to-end security encryption

Works with any object storage

Instant on-demand file access from anywhere

Works with any OS