Customer Stories

The Lower Elwha Tribe maintains security and reduces IT workload with surveillance failover


Redundant

Surveillance footage storage

Granular

Permission management

Reduced

IT staff workload

Synology Surveillance Station is not only reliable, but has made video surveillance and management easier. It's freed up time for our IT team to focus on other necessary tasks.

Ken Giersch, IT Director 

Protecting primary surveillance storage

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.

Increased redundancy with surveillance server failover

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 which allows 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 Centralized Management Systems (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 Surveillance Station around the community from a central location.

 

Workflow diagram for Lower Elwha Tribe

Surveillance deployment protection and streamlined management

With the new Synology set up, the Lower Elwha Tribe has a reliable surveillance system for all of their department buildings with a failover system in case any on-site NVR is taken or goes down, ensuring that their cameras will still be able to record footage.

They are also able to 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 been able to configure granular access rules that allow tribal police to retrieve security footage from a self-service portal. This has greatly reduced the burden to the IT team as it was time consuming for them to scrub through video footage in order to locate a necessary section for law enforcement. This new systems allows tribal police to be more self-sufficient, and simplifies the chain of custody for evidence.

The Customer

The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe is a sovereign, federally recognized Indian Nation located in the Lower Elwha River Valley just west of Port Angeles, Washington. They are self-governed with 16 tribal administrative departments that oversee the function and daily lives of the reservation and its tribal members.

Non-Profit
1-99
United States

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