Summary and benefits

Milestone Federated Architecture offers surveillance system architects, designers and administrators the possibility to implement a large-scale surveillance system that span multiple physical locations.

Key features of Milestone Federated Architecture are:

  • Versatile architecture with unrestricted scalability and operational flexibility

  • Easy deployment and management with very few steps to add sites to the hierarchy

  • Easy management of all sites in the Milestone Federated Architecture hierarchy even though all sites are not running on the same XProtect product or version

  • The ability to bring geographically dispersed installations into one centrally managed system

  • A unified and seamless management and operator interface throughout the hierarchy

  • Flexible and comprehensive user and administrator rights with both global and local access

  • Graphical overview of the entire surveillance installation via the Smart Map function

  • Integrated support for standard product functionality such as Alarm management, XProtect Smart Wall, Bookmarks and Evidence lock.

Benefits of using Milestone Federated Architecture

Milestone Federated Architecture offers benefits in several areas:

  1. Scalability

    • Milestone Federated Architecture allows surveillance system architects, designers, and integrators to design, implement and grow a large-scale surveillance system in manageable parts

    • Milestone Federated Architecture provides the flexibility to create, add and delete sites depending on:

      • Organizational structure

      • Network infrastructure

      • Usage

      • Security

      • Political or legal requirements

  2. Manageability and user privileges

    • Users and administrators can be granted access to any combination of sites - from a single site to all sites in the federated hierarchy

    • Milestone Federated Architecture does not limit the accessibility and management features of the local XProtect Corporate and XProtect Expert sites

  3. Network and Performance

    • When designing the individual sites, the administrator does not have to consider the network and performance of the entire system but can focus on optimizing the design and network layout for just the site in question

    • Connecting the site to the hierarchy only requires a network connection from the local site to the other sites

    • Milestone Federated Architecture does not require any special features in the used network equipment. All traffic is by default standard TCP/IP unicast traffic

  4. Server simplicity

    • Milestone Federated Architecture does not require extra servers on the individual sites to be part of a federated hierarchy, everything is included in the standard XProtect product servers

  5. Redundancy and fault tolerance

    • Milestone Federated Architecture adds extra fault tolerance to XProtect Expert and XProtect Corporate by dividing the system into logical/physical sites that can operate independently of each other in case of failures

    • Local administrators and users can log in, view video, and manage their local site even when the network connection to the federated hierarchy is broken

    • If the connection to a site in the hierarchy is lost, it does not compromise access for global users to cameras on sites that are still online. Only cameras from the disconnected site will be unavailable

    • Standard methods for implementing network redundancy can be used to minimize the risk of losing network connection