Meraki Cameras

[kami]

What makes Meraki cameras unique as compare to other cameras available in the market?

[kYutobi]

Just the fact that it takes (NVR) out from the mix is enough for me. Also that Motion Search makes it easy to track what passes through an object instead of looking through hours of video. I like the MV line its simple.  

[PhilipDAth · Accepted solution]

The home page for MV says it all:

https://meraki.cisco.com/products/security-cameras

• Everything you need is in the box.  No NVR's or seperate software to deply.
• Firmware is automactially managed.  IP based security cameras are the number one generator of DDOS traffic.  This happens because vendors are slow or don't release updates, and customers don't deploy them.  Meraki solves this massive global security problem.  Compromised cameras are also often used for stealing data from companies as they are usually a "forgotten" security threat.
  • https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/27/152463_hacked_cameras_deliver_990gbps_recordbreaking_dual_d...
• Everything on the camera is encrypted.
• All communications with the camera are encrypted.
• A standards based HTML5 interface.  All you need to use a Meraki Camera is a modern browser.
• Because the firmware is cloud managed new features are frequently released.  Its not like a traditional camera system that you get exactly what you pay for on the day, and nothing new afterwards.
• The cameras only consume bandwidth when they are being watched, as opposed to a traditional NVR system that uses bandwidth 24x7.  This makes them great for low bandwdith sites.

[Nick]

NVR's are the number one weak spot in a corporate network. Never patched or updated. Very rarely maintained properly.

Eradicating them is the main benefit.

Then using modern smart technology to save hours looking back through video.

[MerakiDave]

@kami all great replies so far, and as others have pointed out it mostly boils down to a truly NVR-less solution, and it's 100% browser-native so there's no special software or browser plug-ins or controls to add.  It's any browser on any device, anywhere, anytime and you've got full access and control.  It's just a camera, a license, and you're done.  Add in the other items like it's very bandwidth conscious, and video is encrypted at rest, encrypted in transit, with encrypted management traffic so it's also super-secure.  As others have pointed out, eliminating the NVR removes any scalability concerns as well as a common attack vector into many infrastructures.

Apart from the MV solution itself, don't overlook all the benefits of using it within the Meraki Dashboard environment.  That alone makes MV better by default.  Things like RBAC and 2 factor authentication, local time zones, offline device alerting, simple and consistent firmware management, connectivity history, and multiple self-maintaining spreadsheets for things like inventory, change log, licensing, etc all built into the Dashboard and there's no extra effort or cost to manage any of those things. 

Sometimes just one or two of these things are enough for some customers to adopt MV, but all of them taken in combination is very compelling and one of the reasons MV has become one of Meraki's fastest-ramping products ever.

One more item I'll add that helps differentiate Meraki is the advanced analytics and the MV Sense API.  This is true machine learning at work.  Meraki MV cameras constantly train and re-train a neural network that leverages every camera as a sensor, and the more customers who deploy MV, the smarter the system gets (for example about what is and is not human motion) and the more customers benefit from one another. 

In addition to finding out how many people were in a certain place in the past or the present moment, the advanced analytics can be coupled with MV Sense and a sub-second MQTT feed to meet various use cases.  For example, human motion detection could trigger smart lighting, or you can find out how many people are still being detected in a building that was evacuated, or trigger a media display in a retail store when there's more than 5 people nearby or analyze wait times at the cash registers, or in a manufacturing plant it can send an alert and shut off a dangerous piece of machinery if there's not at least 2 people in the room with it.  Stuff like that, just a few examples. 

The analytics are already pretty impressive and of course more will come in time.  MV Sense allows customers to access that person-detection data (time, location, count) through a set of API endpoints to build new tools of your own to meet your specific use cases.