The Lower Elwha Tribe Maintains Security and Reduces IT workload with Surveillance Failover

In 2021, the Lower Elwha Klallam travel center was broken into, including the IT closet where the Network Video Recorder (NVR) was housed for surveillance purposes. Because the NVR was taken, tribal police lost any footage that may have captured the break in. This led to the IT team and administration to seek a surveillance solution that could not only record video but provide the ability for their cameras to fail over to a second NVR in case the primary one goes down for any reason. Furthermore, they wanted to be able to create a secondary copy of the footage at a separate location and archive copies for long-term storage.

The Lower Elwha Tribe implemented a series of 12- and 8-bay Synology NAS at various administration buildings to serve as NVRs for the surveillance cameras at each location. Each of these units runs Synology's Surveillance Station, allowing administrators to record and view footage, set specific alerts and notifications, provide smart video analysis when key events happen, and allow for different levels of access to footage and camera management.

They then installed a 12-bay Synology NAS to act as a Centralized Management System (CMS) for Synology's Surveillance Station and other file-serving tasks. CMS allows both the police department and IT teams to efficiently manage, deploy, and maintain the recordings of all 131 surveillance cameras and the NAS running the Surveillance Station around the community from a central location.

With the new Synology set up, the Lower Elwha Tribe has a reliable surveillance system for all of its department buildings. It also has a failover system in case any on-site NVR is taken or goes down, ensuring that its cameras will still be able to record footage.
They can also control all of their cameras and NVRs from a central location instead of having to sign into each NVR at each deployment site when they need to maintain or manage the cameras and settings.

Finally, the IT team has configured granular access rules allowing tribal police to retrieve security footage from a self-service portal. This has greatly reduced the burden on the IT team as it was time-consuming for them to scrub through video footage to locate a necessary section for law enforcement. This new system allows tribal police to be more self-sufficient and simplifies the chain of custody for evidence.