The TCO of Cloud Surveillance
Cloud-based surveillance has been making inroads globally, but in Africa, bandwidth costs and infrastructure constraints have complicated the picture. Is the cloud still worth it? SMART Security Solutions put the question directly to DeepAlert to get a frank assessment.
When it comes to AI video analytics specifically, however, DeepAlert is clear that the cloud wins. The computational intensity of running deep neural networks makes cloud-based processing far more cost-effective than maintaining equivalent on-premises hardware.
The cloud brings obvious advantages: reduced licensing costs, remote accessibility, and the ability to layer AI onto existing analogue systems without hardware replacement. Shared databases make collaborative use cases like licence plate recognition more powerful. The trade-off is a reliance on connectivity — if your internet goes down, so does your analytics layer. For high-stakes applications, onsite redundancy remains important.
DeepAlert’s honest take positions them not as cloud evangelists, but as pragmatic engineers: use the right tool for the right job, and let the numbers guide the decision.
Related Articles