Wasabi Goes All-In On Surveillance With New Cloud Storage Tech

‘Now we are providing a one-shop stop for customers to use Wasabi and Tiger Technology. Customers want one vendor to go to, and not worry about multiple vendors in their solution. Wasabi Surveillance Cloud is now operable with 20 VMS platforms, and we plan to grow that list,’ says David Boland, Wasabi’s vice president of cloud strategy.

Cloud storage provider Wasabi Technologies Wednesday introduced Wasabi Surveillance Cloud, a new offering built with the help of data management provider Tiger Technology.

The new Wasabi Surveillance Cloud addresses the common problem of easily getting video surveillance footage from surveillance cameras to the cloud caused by the lack of a standard way to work with multiple camera manufacturers, said David Boland, vice president of cloud strategy at the Boston-based company.

Wasabi Surveillance Cloud is a combination of Wasabi’s cloud storage and an on-premises application from Alpharetta, Georgia-based Tiger Technology which works on Windows-based PCs or servers to act as a gateway to the cloud, Boland told CRN.

[Related: Wasabi CEO David Friend: $250M Funding To Double Channel Reach, Fuel Global Expansion]

“We are licensing the Tiger Technology software and adding specific features to easily work with our cloud storage and our user interface,” he said. “The Windows app doesn’t need any changes to work with video environments.”

This is an important move for the video surveillance community, said Andy Schreyer, channel sales and marketing officer at Stone Security, a Salt Lake City-based solution provider focused on the industry.

The surveillance world and the physical security world are just now starting to open their eyes to what the cloud can do for them, Schreyer told CRN.

“We’re seeing video surveillance as a service with companies like [San Mateo, California-based] Verkada and [San Francisco-based] Cisco Meraki who offer a subscription-like model,” he said. “But selling to IT departments who work with video surveillance is a difficult task. Those companies offer a proprietary approach because you need to buy their cameras.”

Wasabi is taking a different approach, Schreyer said.

“With Wasabi Surveillance Cloud, everything’s open,” he said. “Any VMS (video management software), any camera. This makes it easy for customers to try the cloud. They can start with a small bucket. So maybe a company with a headquarters and remote offices can do on-premises for the headquarters and the cloud for remote offices.”

A lot of customers are taking a hybrid approach, with some surveillance video stored on-premises and some in the cloud, Schreyer said.

“Wasabi allows for that hybrid transition, and doesn’t charge to pull video out of the cloud,” he said.

Wasabi, which stores customer data without knowing the contents of that data, has served as a cloud destination for video surveillance data that customers stored either via their own Tiger Technology relationship or saved in a standard S3 object store format, Boland said.

“Now we are providing a one-shop stop for customers to use Wasabi and Tiger Technology,” he said. “Customers want one vendor to go to, and not worry about multiple vendors in their solution. Wasabi Surveillance Cloud is now operable with 20 VMS platforms, and we plan to grow that list.”