Cloudastructure’s AI Surveillance Technology Lets Users Monitor Their Businesses Intelligently

Surveillance is here and has been for centuries. Still, the word “surveillance” evokes negative connotations in most minds more often than not. That has never been more true in light of today’s heightened sensitivity to privacy. Despite these concerns, there is and always will be a need for surveillance. Cloudastructure’s intelligent and powerful solution advances and improves traditional surveillance systems. The company provides a trustworthy solution to help businesses find bad actors, speed up response times and create a safer environment.

“Contrary to the perception that surveillance is a breach of privacy, we use it to keep the public safe. We actually use surveillance to find bad actors who have committed a crime and learn more about where they’ve been and what they have been up to.” said Rick Bentley, Founder and CEO of Cloudastructure.

Their cloud based solution does not have network security issues like the legacy systems do. Traditional Network Video Recorder (NVR) on-premises solutions, with open ports and holes in their firewalls, are not secure.  Cloudastructure’s cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) surveillance tool strengthens the entire chain to lock out hackers.

The Cloudastructure Cloud Video Recorder (CVR) uploads the video from each camera to the cloud with a secure outbound-only HTTPS connection. This protects against hackers. “With our advanced user permissions functionality, we put in monitors and controls (with auditable tracking) to see who is watching and ensure that no one is misusing the system,” added Mr. Bentley.

The Cloudastructure platform is constantly monitored and updated to guarantee uptime, safeguard sensitive information and prevent unwanted access or intrusion. Since video and data are uploaded to the cloud, nothing is stored on-premises making data safe from physical damage and theft.

The public safety benefits of having video stored in the cloud and accessible from any authorized user’s mobile device is far reaching. “And perhaps the most significant testament to the public benefits of surveillance is that our advanced AI/ML cloud-based solutions enable easy access for first responders to view footage for fast response,” said Bentley.

The company’s advanced platform allows new AI / ML features to be deployed rapidly. Cloudastructure works with all camera types and can scale to an infinite number of cameras. These capabilities along with the industry’s lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) make Cloudastructure the most advanced cloud-based video surveillance solution.

Cutting-Edge Cloud Surveillance Technology

The video server is perhaps the last enterprise server to move to the cloud. We are seeing rapid movement towards this from enterprise customers looking for better ease of use, administration, functionality at a lower total cost of ownership.

Although video surveillance has been around for a long time it was never intelligent. Users spent endless hours scanning through footage to find what they needed. Happily, surveillance has finally entered the 21st century! That valuable video footage can be used proactively to enhance safety, improve emergency response and increase business intelligence.

Cloud-based AI/ML architecture allows for easy access to live video and searching stored footage from across multiple locations without the need for an on-premises server. Cloudastructure’s surveillance solution integrates machine learning and computer vision to index and store data in the cloud, allowing users to search their video footage by objects with tags and keywords, just like a search engine. “With our cloud-based solution, video is stored off-site making it safe from theft or damage, accessible wherever there’s internet access, and able to support any required retention time. Users can view footage live or search by person, object or other factors,” explained the Cloudastructure founder.

Cloudastructure uses an open source platform. Recently, the company moved from Microsoft’s Azure to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). “That cut our bill in half and got us much better support on what we think is a better platform,” commented Rick Bentley. “We also Dockerized our entire system and are using Kubernetes to manage it.” This means that the company can deploy a whole new copy of its system with the push of a button onto any platform of its choice.

Cloudastructure’s CVRs are Linux-based. They do not support any inbound connections. This means that no one logs into the box, remotely or locally. There are no open ports on the box, no holes in the firewall, no port-forwarding in your router and no VPN. All it needs is an HTTPS connection to Cloudastructure. The equipment automatically updates its OS, Cloudastructure software and any third party code — nothing for the customer’s IT department to do.

“Once the video is in the Cloud, we run the video through a progressively intensive Computer Vision “analytics” cascade. First, we detect all the objects in a video, so you can search later upon those objects. Then, when we detect a human – we look to detect a face. If we detect a face, we crop the face, rotate it, flatten it, decolorize it, and run face recognition on it,” describes Bentley. “These are all computationally expensive steps, but Cloudastructure’s progression maximizes efficiencies to let us run more sophisticated algorithms without breaking the bank.”

With institutional knowledge from companies such as Facebook, Google, Honeywell, Oracle and Uber, the Cloudastructure team is committed to remain on the cutting-edge of cloud-based surveillance and control. Innovation really is at the center of Cloudastructure’s culture.

The Cloudastructure Leader

Rick Bentley, Founder and CEO: Rick also founded Televoke Inc, which was eventually bought by Uber. He raised eight figures of venture capital from VC firms, including Softbank and WI Harper. He was a full-time Advisor to Google X. For five years, he directly reported to Andy Grove (father of OKRs). Never one to shy away from a challenge, he did two consulting gigs in Baghdad.