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>I've never understood why people seem to love these surveillance devices that rely on an external service It is simple really. With the cloud people don't hav

>I've never understood why people seem to love these surveillance devices that rely on an external service It is simple really. With the cloud people don't have to worry about properly managing a server. If they want to access cameras remotely, well with a self-hosted solution then I need to have a proper firewall, security, etc. I need to monitor and maintain the system, perhaps setup fail2ban or something similar, a reverse proxy would also help. This is all a lot of work, or I can just outsource this to the cloud and not worry about it. That said, I would never ever, ever use ring or a system like it (ring directly partners with law enforcement agencies and gives them access to their customers cameras). I recently did a Camera installation at a clients house using Ubiquiti cameras. They cameras are great, and I trust Ubiquiit a hell of a lot more than Ring, to not share video with anyone. The web portal makes it great for management, the iOS app is a huge selling point to my client who loves that she can check the cameras from anywhere. TLDR: cloud isn't inherently bad, you just need to find the right cloud provider, or be willing to take on all the risk and responsibility of running everything on premises.

mulmen 8y ago
Why is network security not important to your camera? Even without a server on premise you still don’t want random people on the internet to look up your webcam, right? So network security is important to all networks.
- hitpointdrew 8y ago
  >Why is network security not important to your camera? It is, but you don't have do very much to secure a camera. The camera is going to call out to whatever cloud provider, which is fine. You can easily just set your firewall to deny all incoming connections from outside (and you should) and the camera will still work fine, since it is calling out (the cloud isn't calling in). This makes it very easy to secure and manage. Self-hosting a security system you want to access remotely is a whole new ball game. Now you dealing with outside connections coming in, exposing ports on your firewall, and now you dealing with needing a static IP address and or figuring out a way around a DHCP address from you ISP. Making sure whatever server you have running your system is patched (both the OS and client software), since that machine is accessible to the outside world. You also need to setup SSL if you don't want your logins to be in clear text. Or all of that can be managed by a cloud provider that you (hopefully) have a degree of trust in. The cloud provider will already have SSL setup, they will have a team of security people monitoring and maintaining their servers. Personally I would never even consider a self-hosted solution, unless one of the follow two were true 1) I didn't care at all about remote access and just closed the system completely so it was only accessible on premises. 2)I was setting up a security appliance with VPN so the remote access could all go through a VPN.

mulmen 8y ago

Why is network security not important to your camera? Even without a server on premise you still don’t want random people on the internet to look up your webcam, right? So network security is important to all networks.

hitpointdrew 8y ago
>Why is network security not important to your camera? It is, but you don't have do very much to secure a camera. The camera is going to call out to whatever cloud provider, which is fine. You can easily just set your firewall to deny all incoming connections from outside (and you should) and the camera will still work fine, since it is calling out (the cloud isn't calling in). This makes it very easy to secure and manage. Self-hosting a security system you want to access remotely is a whole new ball game. Now you dealing with outside connections coming in, exposing ports on your firewall, and now you dealing with needing a static IP address and or figuring out a way around a DHCP address from you ISP. Making sure whatever server you have running your system is patched (both the OS and client software), since that machine is accessible to the outside world. You also need to setup SSL if you don't want your logins to be in clear text. Or all of that can be managed by a cloud provider that you (hopefully) have a degree of trust in. The cloud provider will already have SSL setup, they will have a team of security people monitoring and maintaining their servers. Personally I would never even consider a self-hosted solution, unless one of the follow two were true 1) I didn't care at all about remote access and just closed the system completely so it was only accessible on premises. 2)I was setting up a security appliance with VPN so the remote access could all go through a VPN.