Recorded, or
watched?

When people say “we have CCTV”, they usually mean they have cameras writing to a recorder in a back office. That is a genuinely useful thing to own. It is also a fundamentally different product from monitored CCTV, and the gap between them is the gap between evidence and prevention.

The straight comparison

What actually happens on a monitored site

A camera picks up movement at your boundary at 02:14. Software filters it — a dog or a branch is discarded, a person is escalated. An operator has the live feed on screen within seconds and confirms what they are looking at. A siren sounds on site. The operator then speaks, live, through a speaker mounted on your wall:

“You are under surveillance. Leave immediately.”

Most incidents end there. Somebody testing a gate at 2am is not expecting a human voice describing what they are wearing. If they stay, the client is called, a patrol team is dispatched and local police are alerted. Either way a clip and a written report land with the owner the same day. Our full procedure is on the how it works page.

Three problems recording alone cannot solve

1. Footage is not deterrence

A recorder does not change the intruder’s behaviour, because the intruder knows nobody is watching tonight. Grainy footage of a masked man carrying your stock out of the gate is worth something to an insurer and very little to you.

2. The recorder is inside the building being robbed

This is the failure that surprises people most. If the DVR sits in the same premises, an organised group takes the DVR with them. Monitored systems push the clip off site the moment the alert fires, so the evidence exists whatever happens to the hardware.

3. Nobody notices when it stops working

Disks fill, cameras drift out of focus, a cable gets cut, the internet drops. On an unwatched system you discover this on the morning you need the footage. On a monitored system a camera going offline is itself an alert — we know, and we tell you.

When plain recording is genuinely enough

It would be easy to say every site needs monitoring. That is not true, and pretending otherwise is how people end up over-sold.

• The premises is occupied around the clock anyway — a 24-hour manufacturing unit with staff and supervisors always present.
• The value at risk is genuinely low — if a worst-case night costs you a few thousand rupees, a monitoring subscription may not pay for itself.
• You mainly need cameras for internal disputes — attendance, damage claims, pilferage investigations, customer arguments. Recording handles all of that.
• The site is already inside a monitored campus — some industrial estates and societies already run perimeter monitoring.

When monitoring pays for itself immediately

• The site is empty for twelve hours a day or all weekend.
• A single bad night would cost you lakhs — stock, copper, machinery, equipment.
• The perimeter is long, or open, or unlit — warehouses, yards, plots, construction sites.
• You have already had an attempt, or you are seeing signs of one being planned.
• Your existing guard cannot physically cover the whole site.

You can often keep the cameras you have

If your existing cameras are in working order and compatible, they can usually be brought into monitoring rather than replaced. We check this at the survey and tell you either way — including when the honest answer is that your current hardware is not worth keeping.

More questions answered on the FAQ page, or read the warehouse checklist to audit your own site first.