New Grandmothers. "Innovative" cloud video surveillance

Many have heard the sensational story of a young Altai student, Alexey Babushkin, who created a unique antivirus, in the intervals between Microsoft’s help in developing Windows 8 and creating a flash drive to store the entire Internet.

Unfortunately, this is only the tip of the iceberg of our Russian reality, which is very easy to see, because it is visible. In fact, there are much more such “innovators”. At one time, Ashmanov called them magicians, albeit in a slightly different context. And often it is not even one person, but a whole company. For example, the one we encountered successfully sold a set of bash scripts of 100 lines for 3 million rubles!

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In order for the story to be complete, it is necessary to clarify how we learned about this company and their decision, so I will allow myself a small lyrical digression.



Today, our service Ivideon is the undisputed leader in the provision of cloud video surveillance services in Russia and the CIS countries. That is why every week we receive applications from providers, telecom operators and other companies with offers to sell our products to provide services under our own brand. For a long time, we refused to do this, since we simply could not physically maintain and update several disparate solutions. After all, the success of any company is, above all, focusing the business in a given direction without constant care to the side.
Nevertheless, in the fall of 2012, we completed the development of a solution that allows virtually any provider or company to become a virtual operator of our cloud-based video surveillance service, providing it to our customers under our own brand and using our own tariffs. This is the fastest and cheapest opportunity to enter this market. No need to buy expensive software and even equipment, pay for updates and improvements while earning up to 75% of the profits from the subscription fee. Therefore, by November our solution was implemented at 4 sites. As a result, we not only received new sources of revenue, but also additional server capacity, as well as communication channels to serve our own clients.

"Innovative" technology. How we found it and how it works

At the end of January, when everyone had already moved away from the holidays and prepared for new victories in the new year, we agreed to implement our service in the network of a rather large provider. Moreover, this provider has already provided this service, based on the developments of some innovative Russian company. And these innovative developments, well, did not want to work at all. The cameras fell off, the archive was not written, the events did not come. Users were simply in a frenzy and massively unsubscribed from the service after the first week of operation. And this solution was bought by the provider for almost 3 million rubles only for software licenses!



To ensure that heavy video traffic does not extend beyond the provider's network to the Internet, we deploy our so-called regional Ivideon nodes on its servers.

After the coordination of legal aspects in early February, the provider provided us with a server for launching nodes. And on them, our system administrator discovered an “innovative” cloud-based surveillance system, which was implemented by the provider before us.

It was a set of folders, each of which served one camera of one subscriber. Each camera was connected manually by an employee of the provider. To do this, he specified her IP address on the network, login, password and archive size in hours. "Innovative" software created a new folder where a brilliant bash script was written, consisting of 10 lines. Linux wget utility connected to a remote camera and requested a single JPEG, which was recorded in a file. Then another utility was called with the name of the newly recorded and previous JPEG and, apparently, it reported whether there was motion in the frame or not. If there was movement, then the information about it was recorded in the MySQL base by another challenge. And then everything was repeated again and again. As they say, all ingenious is simple! It does not matter that already 30 cameras hung the file system and the processor of a sufficiently powerful server almost tightly.

And what about the high degree of reliability? Another script came to the rescue, this time running on cron. Every 15 minutes, all scripts for each of the cameras were killed and restarted. And every 2 hours - the archive rotation procedure was launched. From the database, the value of the adjusted recording duration for the camera was extracted, each recorded JPEG was read and its time compared with the current one. If more than the specified value has passed since its recording, it was deleted. Also deleted entries from the base of the presence of movement.
A solution that would be embarrassing to give out even for bachelor's work, where even elementary protection of user data and traffic encryption is missing - sold for good money.
Needless to say, with such a solution, the provider could not discourage the investment?

Summary

Our opinion. In no case should shoeless shoemakers be in such a situation. If you see that the company, which claims that it is an advanced designer, could not make the design of even its own website sane, then what can we say?
Similarly, here. How can you create an effective and reliable cloud solution for video surveillance without testing it on real users and not having at least a rented rack of servers on which this solution is deployed to showcase to potential customers? And most importantly. When a company develops such software and starts selling it, it naturally demonstrates confidently growing user schedules and revenues. But at the same time, he categorically refuses the profit-sharing scheme, insisting solely on the sale of his “complex”.



Why are we writing this article? First of all, because the presence of such pseudo-players on the market undermines the trust of many people and companies in the cloud video surveillance service. Having tried once such an “innovative” service, they are disappointed in it and stop using it. And it is very difficult to explain to them that they were simply the victim of fraudsters. I would like to wish that on our way with you as less as possible there were such scammers. But, unfortunately, while it is not real. So I wish that we could recognize them quickly and have no business with them. And we hope that our article will help at least with this.