Video surveillance as a service(VSaaS)
Video surveillance as a service, or VSaaS, is a subscription in which cameras stream to a cloud service that records, stores, streams and manages the video instead of a recorder on site. The customer keeps its cameras and its internet connection and pays per camera or per instance per month for the service.
What is VSaaS? The full guide →
The term comes from the buyer's side: the recorder, the server and the software that used to be bought are replaced by a service, the way software as a service replaced installed software. Recording, storage, live view, user access and updates are included; cameras, installation and the site's bandwidth are not.
A VSaaS subscription is the same thing a cloud VMS delivers, described as a service rather than as software. Vendors use the two terms for the same model, and a buyer comparing offers should read what each subscription includes rather than which name it carries.
On Camzify the subscription is per instance per month: a stream instance for each camera, a detection instance for each AI feature on a camera, a patrol instance for each camera on rounds, and storage per terabyte. AI detections and scheduled patrol rounds run inside the same service on the same streams.
A site with too little upstream bandwidth for its cameras, or a policy that footage must never leave the building, is the case where a recorder on site remains the better fit.