The cloud manages. The drive at the site carries on recording.

When somebody starts thinking about moving to the cloud, it is almost never about the cloud. It is about not having to look after twenty machines.

It is a genuinely hybrid architecture, not a cloud with a consolation drive.

• The unit at the site records and stores, and it has to be sized just as always: channels, resolution, real days of retention and the drive space that asks for. The cloud does not remove that calculation, and anyone who gets it wrong will have the same problem they had before.
• The cloud is the management plane: centralised users and permissions, health status of every unit and every camera, updates pushed without going to the site, remote configuration and access from outside. That is the product, and that is what you pay for.
• Cameras: it works with third-party equipment over the standard protocols and there are also cameras of its own. The difference from a closed-hardware platform shows up in the bill for a refresh — if what is installed is good enough, it stays.
• Redundancy: what protects the video is the unit at the site, with mirrored drives and the option of sending a copy of what matters off site. And that unit is still something that can fail and that can be carried away, so where it goes is a project decision and not a stores decision.
• Access control and intruder detection are integrated, not unified: events that mark the video and alerts that travel wherever they have to go. There is an API for pulling status, events and video out to other systems — it is not the most open platform on this list, and for what it is normally used for it is enough.

With this split, three have short answers. And the fifth has to be asked more carefully than anywhere else.

Here the border is sharp and it is nearly always set by the connection at the sites.

A hybrid platform means work on both sides: the classic recording calculation and the service part.

• The sizing of each site the old-fashioned way, because it is still needed here: channels, resolution, frames, real days of retention and the drive space that asks for, with room for the cameras that will come later.
• The decision about what goes up and what does not: status always, video when somebody watches, and a copy off site only of what has to be kept even if the unit disappears.
• The implementation: units, a video network separate from the company's, cameras checked by day and by night, permissions by role, two-factor, and the health status configured so that it alerts somebody with a name and not a generic mailbox.
• What we ask the manufacturer for in writing before the customer signs: what can be done locally without the cloud, what happens to the unit if the service is dropped, the region the data sits in and the processing contract, and support and replacements in your country.
• The migration and the maintenance: here the cameras often stay and what changes is the recorder. They run side by side for a few weeks, whatever has to be kept is exported, and after that fields of view, drives, versions, retention measured —not estimated— and an annual review of the camera and subscription inventory.

This split is the one best understood inside a company with IT, because it looks like the way they already manage the rest of their equipment.

• IT: accounts, two-factor, the network at each site, the update window and keeping an eye on status. Unlike a pure cloud, here there are physical machines with a warranty, an end of life and drives that get replaced, and that goes into the IT inventory like any other server.
• Security, or whoever is in charge of each site: watching, searching, bookmarking and exporting. It is done from the browser, it is learned in a morning and it lets you give each manager access to their own cameras only.
• The border that has to be made clear: IT watches the health status, but the person who decides that a camera which has not recorded for two weeks is urgent is not IT. You have to write down what gets watched, how often and who it gets escalated to.
• What it demands of the integrator is knowing about recording and about networks, and also being able to explain the model. A lot of customers arrive believing that «cloud» means the video is outside, and here it is the other way round; if the integrator does not explain that difference, the customer signs expecting something else.
• Training: a morning for day-to-day use, with a sheet per site. And a session with IT on the local unit —drives, replacements, updates, what to do when a site does not answer— and on what can be done with no connection. That last part gets forgotten and it is the one you need on the day the line goes.
• Documentation: an inventory of units per site with their warranty and their drive, a sheet per camera with what it sees and the real measured retention, a map of profiles, what goes up to the cloud and what does not, a subscription table with dates, and the administrator accounts in the customer's name.

Almost nobody chooses video software by looking at a single platform. These are neighbours in the same conversation, and the index leads to all twenty.