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.
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.