Smarter Cameras for Safer Schools

New capabilities and features enable more secure learning environments

Today, district IT teams are tasked with not only keeping the network secure but also with ensuring physical safety for students and staff. How do you keep students protected, while balancing your day job?

This webcast explained how a new generation of security cameras is changing the way school leaders think about video surveillance, with systems that can be managed from an intuitive, web-based dashboard without extra servers or software required. Plus, integrated features enable administrators to proactively identify threats and make informed decisions to create secure learning environments.

Speakers

George Bentinck is Product Manager, Camera Systems at Cisco Meraki.
George Bentinck is
Product Manager,
Camera Systems at Cisco Meraki.
Saralyn Dasig is Channel Product Specialist, Physical Security at Cisco Meraki,
Saralyn Dasig is Channel Product Specialist,
Physical Security at Cisco Meraki.

George Bentinck: You don’t need to be an expert in camera systems or IP networking to provide a safe and secure environment for your children and students to learn and to grow.

Saralyn Dasig: Student safety is a top priority. We combine the best of both network and physical security. With network security, we look at protecting student data, complying with security regulations, and preventing hackers and malicious files from infiltrating your network. We combine that with physical security, which helps provide a safe and secure learning environment from the classroom to the playground.

Ensuring student safety can mean many different things, such as easily finding trespassers or anomalous activity within your school, making sure students are safe and that they are where they should be, and locating missing items including an iPad, laptop or backpack. If there is an issue, you can easily give access to live or stored security camera footage to those who need it, including law enforcement. Security cameras, just by the sake of being there and being visible, can proactively mitigate risks and incidents. 

George Bentinck: The Meraki dashboard is one management interface for all our products. You don’t need to be a specialist—you can be a standard IT person. Being able to work in one interface, all with the same login, means you drastically reduce what you need to learn. You can get things done rather than spend time reading manuals.

The other thing I find very intriguing is the idea of other products working with this interface, in terms of mobile device management, such as iPads. I am not aware of another vendor that has these types of products and cameras in the same interface.

Saralyn Dasig: With Meraki MV security cameras, we do more than just security. We offer the only security camera from a cloud leader. With motion and schedule-based retention and analytics, the cameras can act
as sensors, not just as security cameras, giving your organization the ability to understand trends, patterns and help you make better decisions.

With MV, you can get rid of a lot of the complexity, a lot of the headaches and a lot of the pain that come with traditional systems. There’s no need for additional on-premises hardware like an NVR. There’s no need for stand-alone software packages, drivers, plug-ins, IP configurations, or things like that to view video, to analyze video, to understand video.

 George Bentinck: Say we’re looking at a bike room. We can look live. Or I can click on the timeline and it will load that video from that point in time. Or I can use natural language. I can type in “50 minutes ago,” and it will take me to 50 minutes ago. You can use absolute and relative time to find things, and the camera will retrieve the video quickly. 

I don’t want to watch eight hours of video to get to a point when something happened, so I can select anything in the scene retrospectively and zoom out until we get to a point where we find someone who’s moved or changed something. Or you can use it to find out if someone has walked down a corridor or exited a particular door.

You can even set alerts—motion alerts, for example. But you don’t want alerts all the time, so you can say, “Only record out of hours.” I can create a completely new schedule that’s specific to my particular environment, or I could select one that’s only during the week, or for a specific window of time. We can set a schedule for when and how we record. You can customize all of this to suit your particular situation.

Saralyn Dasig: Cisco Meraki is all about simplifying IT with cloud management. It has a complete cloud-managed IT solution with wireless, switching, security, SD-WAN, endpoint management and security cameras. Integrated hardware, software and cloud services make Meraki very easy to use.

To watch this web seminar in its entirety, please visit districtadministration.com/ws011719

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