Questions · Networks
Do I need a separate network just for the cameras or is a VLAN enough?
It depends what you want to avoid. A VLAN separates the traffic inside the same switches: the cameras stop seeing the computers, the video stops mixing with everything else and you can decide what talks to what. A physically separate network, with its own switches and its own cabling, also separates what the VLAN still shares: the capacity of the equipment, its power supply and its luck the day somebody gets a configuration wrong.
A VLAN is enough when the network you have has capacity to spare, the switches are managed and there is somebody in IT running it sensibly. The separate network is justified when the existing one is already tight, when the video cannot depend on a change made by another team, or when the client needs to be able to say, with a document in front of them, that the images never touch the corporate network.
What is never acceptable is the flat network: cameras and computers in the same bag with nobody in charge. On a flat network, whoever reaches a camera hanging off a pole in the car park has reached the accounts.
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