Imagine, for a moment, that you’re sitting in your parents’ or grandparents’ living room. There’s a coffee table, and it’s cluttered with three or four remotes, all controlling different systems, writes video surveillance product manufacturer Hanwha Vision Europe.
One for the TV, one for the set-top box, one for the DVD player (remember that?!), and a fourth for the audio system. Simply tuning into the evening news involved a complex process of turning on the TV with one, switching the HDMI over with another, and adjusting the sound with yet another remote. One wrong button press, one wrong remote, and suddenly you’re looking at a blank screen or a “no signal” message.
This complexity and poor user experience have long been mirrored in the security industry. Over time, many video management systems (VMS) evolved to resemble those old, button-heavy remotes. Every time a client requested a new feature, a new interface was rolled out with more buttons, more screens, and more toggling. That’s not how an operator is going to get their job done quickly and efficiently.
Why simple and intuitive interfaces are the future
It’s time to rethink the VMS. No longer is this system a way of viewing footage; instead, it has become the engine behind the security function. And to use it effectively, operators need a simple and intuitive interface.
The number of digital interfaces that operators need to manage has increased in recent years, causing cognitive load and task switching to also rise. Research shows that workers take around 23 minutes to re-focus after switching tasks or systems, losing between 20 to 40% of productivity as they reorient. Preventing operators from jumping between disconnected applications and hidden menus allows them to focus on protecting assets, preventing situations from escalating, and responding to events. The most effective VMS is a consolidated system, divided into logical blocks and tabbed navigation, so operators understand where functions are and can see footage at a glance.
Improving the total cost of ownership
With the front-end experience improved, we can shift focus to the infrastructure and hardware behind it. It can be easy to pick a VMS based on the cost of a single-channel licence and believe that this is the most cost-effective solution. However, licenses are usually the start of your costs, with hardware, server maintenance, infrastructure, and deployment time also impacting your total cost of ownership (TCO).
As AI capabilities advance, organisations need infrastructure that can scale without driving up unnecessary costs. Traditional deployments often require additional servers to provide redundancy and support future growth, meaning hardware, rack space and power are allocated long before they are needed. This can leave valuable resources sitting idle while still adding to operational costs.
Choosing a VMS with active-active failover clustering helps eliminate this inefficiency. Instead of maintaining standby servers that sit idle until a failure occurs, multiple servers actively share the workload under normal operation. If one server fails, the remaining servers automatically take over, maximising available computing resources while maintaining system resilience.
For designers of enterprise-scale systems, this provides a strong foundation. A single server can support up to 256 devices, while a clustered deployment scales to 12,800 channels. Organisations managing multiple locations can also connect sites through cloud federation, enabling centralised management without adding operational complexity.
Just as importantly, modernising an existing deployment does not have to mean starting from scratch. Comprehensive support for established ONVIF standards, RTSP streams and a robust open API makes it straightforward to integrate legacy infrastructure, avoiding vendor lock-in while providing a future-ready platform that can adopt new protocols as they emerge.
Even the licensing model becomes more straightforward. One license equals one camera. However, if you connect IP speakers or intercoms, a single license covers up to four devices. When integrating an NVR, one license covers eight channels. This hardware optimisation combined with a flexible licensing approach ultimately delivers a significantly more cost-effective and stable deployment.
Improving operator performance
Often, the biggest improvements to productivity come when an individual understands how to use a system effectively. The interface, as we touched on before, is a significant influence on this. Advanced video analytics and AI-powered search features play a role too. For example, if an operator needs to search for an event, such as overcrowding in a busy car park, video analytics can help them search the footage quickly. Instead of hours of manual footage scrubbing, the operator can use an event histogram (a type of graphic that shows baseline and spikes in events) to quickly identify times when an anomaly occurred. They can jump directly to those events with a single click to investigate what happened.
If an operator needs to find a specific object, such as a vehicle of interest, they can use AI-powered search to sift through footage based on unique visual characteristics. For example, the vehicle type, make, model, and colour. Not only will they see relevant footage, but they can track this vehicle across different cameras to see where it travels across the car park.
Taking this a step further, some VMS platforms now support semantic search powered by generative AI. Rather than relying on predefined metadata such as clothing colour or object type, operators can use natural language to describe what they are looking for. For example, they can search for “a woman holding a phone,” and the system understands the context to locate relevant footage, making it easier to find events that may have been difficult to identify using traditional attribute-based searches.
Cybersecurity at the core of the VMS
We live in an era where physical security systems are an integral part of IT infrastructure and are subject to stringent audit requirements. The NIS2 Directive and the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) leave no room for compromise. VMS need to address these challenges at every layer of the network. Look for features such as encrypted camera communications to tamper-resistant exported clips, and intelligent session management. Audit logs will record every user action, which helps spot unusual behaviour that could signal a breach; meanwhile, automatic HTTPS negotiation and JWT-based authentication ensure your VMS meets gold-standard IT security requirements. Some VMS are deployed within hardened, closed operating environments that prevent user access to the underlying operating system. This minimises the operating system as a potential attack surface and helps strengthen the overall cybersecurity posture.
The VMS has come a long way since its invention in the early 1940s. Taking the time to understand the options available now can ensure your security function performs optimally, safely, and cost-effectively. The best VMS can be learned quickly, with intuitive interfaces that don’t require a thick manual or days of training. They unify your different security features and systems, so operators don’t waste time switching between applications. And they have a robust infrastructure that supports advanced analytics and AI.
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