Applied use of Milestone Interconnect

Retail chains

Retail chains with individual shops often need video surveillance in each shop for employee security, to counter theft, and to control internal fraud. However, retail chains often also wish to link the independent surveillance sites in each shop with headquarters to form a large, centralized VMS, since it lowers operational costs and optimizes administration, monitoring, and fraud investigation.

Using XProtect Corporate or XProtect Expert in all the shops and then linking the sites together using Milestone Federated Architecture is often not desired, because the individual shops don’t need the advanced functionality these products offer. Furthermore, using XProtect Corporate or XProtect Expert in all shops can be costly. Another reason for not using Milestone’s Federated Architecture is that the bandwidth between the shops and the headquarters is often limited and used for critical business data during opening hours.

For these types of customers Milestone Interconnect is the ideal solution because it supports using the simpler low-cost VMS products in the many shops while at the same time allowing the shops to be connected to the headquarters’ advanced XProtect Corporate system.

For retail customers, Milestone Interconnect answers customer needs in the following areas:

  1. Cost-effective

    With Milestone Interconnect, retail chains can build a cost-effective and geographically dispersed surveillance installation. Different sites can use different XProtect VMS or Husky products designed for small to medium businesses while still obtaining a centralized surveillance experience in the headquarters.

  2. Efficient bandwidth control:

    Milestone Interconnect offers efficient control of bandwidth usage, by configuring when recordings are retrieved from the remote site and by setting the maximum bandwidth that can be used.

  3. Centralized management:

    Milestone Interconnect offers access to centrally monitor and manage the interconnected sites.

  4. Internal revision:

    Headquarters can have seamless access to the shops’ VMS for investigating internal fraud and for exporting evidence. Should bandwidth limitations exist, the system can be configured so users instead can request recordings to be transferred to the central site, which then can be configured only to be done at a set maximum bitrate and/or time period.

Transportation

Transportation companies need an extremely reliable and flexible solution that combines a standard surveillance installation on train stations, bus terminals, ferry terminals, or in any other buildings with onboard vehicle surveillance installations that are only connected to the surveillance network during certain times.

Mobile surveillance installations are generally a challenge since it requires either: a) permanent high-speed wireless access to the vehicles at all times - which is expensive, or b) a manual procedure to extract physically the recordings from the vehicle’s onboard surveillance installation - which is slow and cumbersome.

Milestone Interconnect offers an ideal solution for transportation companies with distributed surveillance sites in buildings and vehicles. It does this by addressing the central challenges of handling intermittent connections to video surveillance installations in vehicles:

  1. Intermittent connection:

    Milestone Interconnect does not require a permanent high-speed connection to the vehicles as long as the vehicles have access to the VMS network from time to time, for instance via wireless hotspots at bus stops, train stations, ferry terminals, etc.

  2. Retrieve recordings for incident investigation:

    Milestone Interconnect does not need a manual procedure to retrieve recordings physically. Investigators can request recordings to be retrieved from the vehicles whether they are connected to the network or not at the time of the request. If recordings are requested while vehicles are out of network reach, the request is queued, and the needed recordings are transferred once the network is accessible again.

  3. Management:

    When the vehicles are online, the VMS in them can be accessed and administered centrally, reducing the need for physical in-vehicle maintenance.

  4. Combined surveillance:

    With Milestone Interconnect, the VMS in the vehicles can be combined with stationary surveillance installations to provide a complete security solution.

Security companies offering centrally managed video surveillance

Companies offering physical onsite security combined with centrally managed video surveillance and alarm services require a VMS solution that can tie the security company’s central VMS installation together with the VMS installations on the customer sites and provide access to the following specific functionality:

  • Access to live and recorded video, audio, and metadata both locally for the customer and centrally for the security company

  • User permissions to control what the customer can access locally and what the security company’s users can access centrally

  • Receive events from the customer VMS in the central security company VMS

  • Trigger alarms in the security company VMS based on received events from the customer VMS installations

  • Remotely maintain and administrate the customer VMS installations

In addition to these specific features, the solution must also support a mix of installations of different sizes and choice of XProtect VMS or Husky products.

With these requirements in mind, Milestone Interconnect is the ideal solution for such security companies because it offers the following:

  1. Wide product support:

    Milestone Interconnect supports all paid XProtect VMS and Husky products and installations of any size – from simple installations with only a few cameras to more advanced installations with an unrestricted number of cameras.

  2. Flexible authentication:

    Milestone Interconnect can connect to remote sites using the following authentication methods: Basic users, local Windows users, or Windows Active Directory users. Furthermore, if the customer uses a domain in their IT installation, Milestone Interconnect doesn’t require an AD trust to be created between the customer’s domain and the security company’s domain.

  3. Central monitoring and management:

    Security companies can centrally monitor their customers’ sites and quickly address any detected issues. Furthermore, the customer’s installations can be managed centrally without needing to physically visit the customer site.

  4. Central alarm management:

    Security companies can offer their customers centralized alarm management with integrated video surveillance, which increases situational awareness, reduces response times, and can, with access to cameras, be used to identify false alarms.

  5. Network connection:

    Milestone Interconnect works with intermittent connections, low bandwidth connections, or connections where a certain percentage of the bandwidth is reserved for other purposes. This is done by support for scheduled retrieval functionality with bandwidth throttling and retrieval retry/resume functionality ensuring transfer of all requested recordings.

City surveillance

Large, distributed city surveillance installations require a flexible and price-conscious solution that covers their needs in a highly fragmented and distributed surveillance environment, consisting of sites owned and managed by different entities ranging from individually installed cameras over small or medium-sized installations to advanced high-security installations with thousands of cameras.

XProtect Corporate addresses these needs by offering several ways to connect these cameras and surveillance sites.

  1. Individual cameras:

    Individually mounted cameras throughout the city can be attached to the VMS in the same way as cameras connected to the local network. When attaching cameras outside the local security network to the VMS it is recommended to use HTTPS to secure the communication.

  2. Milestone Interconnect:

    Milestone Interconnect allows multiple sites running XProtect VMS and Husky products to be connected to a central XProtect Corporate site without needing administrator rights or AD trusts on the remote sites.

  3. Milestone Federated Architecture:

    Milestone Federated Architecture offers a solution to link XProtect Corporate and XProtect Expert sites with a central XProtect Corporate site. If the remote sites are not part of the Domain of the central site, a domain trust must be created.

Each of these three ways to attach cameras and sites to a central XProtect Corporate site offers specific strengths, features, and use cases.

In addition to the Milestone Interconnect information covered in this white paper, more information about the general VMS architecture and Milestone Federated Architecture can be found here: