Camera count is driven by the number of openings and the assets you have to see clearly, not by square footage. A typical small commercial building lands at 8 to 16 cameras; a warehouse or multi-building site runs 24 to 60 or more.
We plan coverage in priority order so the budget goes to the views that matter in an investigation. Every exterior door, dock, and gate gets an identification-quality view of faces and plates; interior cameras cover cash handling, inventory, server and electrical rooms, and main circulation paths. Overview cameras then fill the gaps so an incident can be followed from entry to exit without losing the subject.
- Entry and egress: identification-grade coverage at every exterior door, dock, gate, and stairwell
- High-value assets: registers, inventory cages, tool cribs, pharmacy or parts rooms, IT and electrical rooms
- Perimeter and parking: license plate capture at drive lanes, wide coverage across lots and yards
- Continuity: overlapping overview views so a person can be tracked between cameras
Thirty days is the common commercial baseline, 60 to 90 days is standard where insurance, corporate policy, or liability exposure requires it, and some regulated operations retain a year.
Retention drives storage cost more than camera count does, because resolution, frame rate, and compression all multiply against the day count. We size storage from your actual retention requirement and use smart codecs and motion-based recording to keep it economical. For public-sector and many enterprise contracts, cameras and recorders must also be NDAA Section 889 compliant — we specify NDAA-compliant equipment by default so a site is not disqualified later.
- 30 days: general commercial baseline for most offices, retail, and light industrial
- 60–90 days: insurance-driven, multi-tenant property, and higher-liability environments
- NDAA Section 889 compliance specified as standard for government, education, and enterprise work
An on-site NVR is the cheaper way to hold long retention at high resolution; cloud video is the better fit for multi-site access, no server maintenance, and footage that survives the recorder being stolen or destroyed.
Most of our commercial deployments end up hybrid: record locally on the NVR for full retention, push event clips and a lower-bitrate stream to the cloud for remote review and off-site protection. That keeps bandwidth and subscription cost in check while still giving a regional manager browser access to every location.
- NVR: lowest cost per recorded day, no upload bandwidth constraint, footage stays on site
- Cloud: nothing to maintain on site, off-site copy, one login across every location
- Hybrid: local full-rate recording with cloud event clips and remote access
Active deterrence cameras respond to a detected person with a strobe, spotlight, and spoken warning on the spot. Video verification sends the clip of an alarm event to the monitoring center or your team so a real intruder is confirmed before police are dispatched.
The two work together. Deterrence stops most loitering, trespass, and cargo theft attempts before anything is taken. Verification then addresses the other side of the problem: most jurisdictions treat unverified burglar alarms as low priority and fine repeat false dispatches, while a verified event is escalated as a crime in progress. Analytics filter out headlights, animals, and weather so the alerts that reach a person are worth acting on.
Usually, yes — and often without pulling new cable. Existing RG-59 coax can carry IP video and power using Ethernet-over-coax adapters, so an analog site can move to IP cameras while reusing the runs already in the walls.
We test each coax home run first, since cable condition, connector quality, and distance determine what the link will sustain. Where a run fails or a camera needs a location the old cabling never reached, we pull Cat6. The usual approach is to replace cameras and the recorder, keep serviceable cable, and phase the work by area so the site is never without coverage.
- Coax home runs tested for length, condition, and terminations before anything is quoted
- Ethernet-over-coax used to reuse cable; Cat6 pulled only where it is actually needed
- Analog DVR replaced with an NVR or hybrid recorder sized for your retention target
- Work phased by zone so the facility keeps recorded coverage throughout the upgrade
