What to Look for in a CCTV and Surveillance System for Your Business
Camera count isn't the metric that matters. Coverage, retention, and who's actually watching the footage are what determine whether a CCTV system earns its cost.
It's easy to judge a CCTV proposal by camera count, but the more important questions are about coverage and follow-through: are entrances, loading bays and cash-handling areas actually in frame, or just the easy-to-mount spots? How long is footage retained, and does that match how quickly an incident is typically reported? And critically — is anyone actually watching in real time, or is footage only ever reviewed after something has already gone wrong?
The biggest gap we see in existing systems isn't camera quality, it's the lack of a monitoring plan behind the hardware. A camera that only gets reviewed retroactively is a recording device, not a security measure. Pairing CCTV with a staffed command centre — or at minimum, AI analytics that flag anomalies for review — is what turns footage into something that can actually prevent or interrupt an incident, not just document it afterward.