Can I view a CCTV feed from across the country using internet?

[dencti]

Okay so I'll be very honest here. I'm a noob when it comes CCTV.
Here's what I need to get done:
We have over a dozen branches throughout our tiny third world country. My boss wants to broadcast the CCTV feed from the branches to our Admin office so she can monitor what's happening in the other branches.

Can I get it done through the internet using some third-party VPN software? Do I need to have the internet connection of the branches moved to Static IP?

 

[bill001g]

The largest issue is one of upload bandwidth at the remote locations. Good internet is hard to come by in many cities in some countries.
VPN tends to be the best solution. Many companies already have VPN so that all the employees at the remote offices can have access to corporate email or file shares the video cameras/servers are just more machines at the location.

It is not really that hard once you get the hang of setting up vpn. You can have dynamic IP at the remote locations but you will need a static at the main location. You in general use a router or small firewall at each location to run the tunnels. You might be able to run it on your video server but that would depend on the system being used. I would use the standard IPSEC vpn when you have control of both locations, it tends to be simpler in many ways to setup than SSLVPN. There are many example depending on which equipment you use of how to setup multiple remote offices.

To make things simpler in the long run you want to run each remote office on a different subnet. Ie 192.168.x.x. or even take them out of the 10.x.x.x block. You can have duplicate ip blocks but it make thing harder to make work.

The largest issue is going to be the bandwidth required. What our company does is watch very low frame rate video from remote sites but if they need to they can switch to a higher rates when needed. The video is recorded locally at the higher rate so it is only transferred over the data link if necessary. How exactly this works I don't really know it is part of the security system software....all we do is yell at the security guys when they use too much bandwidth.

 

[dencti]

The largest issue is one of upload bandwidth at the remote locations. Good internet is hard to come by in many cities in some countries.
VPN tends to be the best solution. Many companies already have VPN so that all the employees at the remote offices can have access to corporate email or file shares the video cameras/servers are just more machines at the location.

It is not really that hard once you get the hang of setting up vpn. You can have dynamic IP at the remote locations but you will need a static at the main location. You in general use a router or small firewall at each location to run the tunnels. You might be able to run it on your video server but that would depend on the system being used. I would use the standard IPSEC vpn when you have control of both locations, it tends to be simpler in many ways to setup than SSLVPN. There are many example depending on which equipment you use of how to setup multiple remote offices.

To make things simpler in the long run you want to run each remote office on a different subnet. Ie 192.168.x.x. or even take them out of the 10.x.x.x block. You can have duplicate ip blocks but it make thing harder to make work.

The largest issue is going to be the bandwidth required. What our company does is watch very low frame rate video from remote sites but if they need to they can switch to a higher rates when needed. The video is recorded locally at the higher rate so it is only transferred over the data link if necessary. How exactly this works I don't really know it is part of the security system software....all we do is yell at the security guys when they use too much bandwidth.

Thanks Night Owl. I really needed this. We already have VPN in our main office and only one of our remote offices is connected to it. I'm going to use VPN in my initial proposal then.