Video Technology as a Building Discipline: One Global Standard

Video technology has long been more than a security system bolted on after the fact: as an integral part of building technology, it is closely interlinked with IT networks, access control, building automation, and archiving infrastructure – and must be reliably operated, maintained, and documented across a building's entire life cycle. In regulated environments, another dimension is added: video recordings become compliance evidence that must remain available and immutable for decades. The example of a global pharmaceutical manufacturer shows how these requirements can be mastered across distributed sites with a unified standard – with lessons that are relevant far beyond the pharmaceutical industry.

Video Technology: From Stand-Alone System to Integrated Building Technology

In modern buildings and production facilities, video technology is no longer an isolated island solution. Cameras, video management systems, and storage infrastructure share networks with the rest of the building technology, rely on central server rooms, and interact with access control, intrusion detection, and increasingly with building automation. Anyone planning video technology is therefore always also planning network architecture, power supply, climate control for equipment rooms, and IT security. For planners and operators of technical building services, this means: video technology belongs on the same planning level as HVAC, electrical, or security systems – with the same demands for standardization, documentation, and life-cycle thinking.

The Starting Point: Legacy Island Solutions Across Distributed Sites

The case in point: a global healthcare company with around 46,000 employees operates production facilities on three continents. Video technology is an integral part of its production and building processes – from manufacturing and automated filling to quality control and archiving. Over the years, however, the various sites had accumulated an almost unmanageable patchwork of different video systems: video management, DVR, and NVR solutions from a wide range of manufacturers, sometimes involving local providers, without standardized processes or central control.

The effort required for installation, configuration, and maintenance was enormous. Even more serious: there was no standardized process for documenting incidents – a situation no operator can afford whose facilities are inspected by authorities or auditors. This starting point is by no means specific to pharma: it can be found just as readily among operators of logistics centers, food plants, data centers, energy facilities, or large real estate portfolios.

When Video Data Becomes Compliance Evidence

In the pharmaceutical industry, the so-called GxP guidelines (Good Practice) govern good working practice. For video technology, this means specifically: recordings must be stored securely and immutably – in the case described, for up to 30 years. Every access to the system must be fully documented in audit trails: who accessed which camera, when, from where, and with which permissions? Added to this are the data protection requirements of the GDPR.

Comparable documentation and evidence obligations exist in many other industries: in food production (HACCP, IFS), among operators of critical infrastructure, in data centers with certification requirements, or in the chemical and process industries. In all of these environments, video technology serves not only building security but also fulfills concrete regulatory functions – such as documenting critical process steps or providing evidence of proper procedures to auditors.

The Strategy: One Global Standard Instead of Many Individual Solutions

The manufacturer decided on a fundamental step: a dedicated global team – consisting of product specialists, system architects, test engineers, and project managers – defined a globally binding standard for video technology and implemented it together with local stakeholders at each site. The core idea: conceptually ONE global installation – not a loose collection of local stand-alone solutions that happen to share the same software, but a centrally governed system with uniform configuration, operation, and governance.

The basis was the commercially available video management platform Octave Coda Video (formerly HxGN dC3 Video) that works with cameras from a wide range of manufacturers – both existing devices and new installations. Patches, updates, and configuration changes are centrally approved before being rolled out at any site; a staging system – an exact copy of the live environment – ensures that changes are first validated in a test environment. This approach reflects proven principles of professional building operation: defined standards, controlled change processes, central documentation.

The Architecture: Two Networks, One System

A central element of the solution is strict network separation – a topic that concerns planners of building and production IT alike. The production network and the corporate network are consistently separated by firewalls; file transfer between the networks is not permitted, and only defined protocols and ports are allowed. All video technology components – servers, device management, local workstations – reside in the production network; users from the corporate network connect exclusively via terminal server solutions.

Video material requiring long-term archiving is exported from the production network via a clearly defined, traceable process, placed in a temporary transfer location, and then moved into the actual long-term archives. High frame rates of 60 or more frames per second enable forensic analysis of fast process sequences; interfaces (APIs) connect the video technology to third-party systems for error and deviation analysis.

AI-Powered Analytics: From Searching to Finding

In parallel with standardization, the company is piloting AI models that detect deviations in critical processes in real time. Until now, employees had to search video recordings manually for hours to identify the cause of an incident. AI models integrated into the video streams of existing cameras, by contrast, detect suspicious behavior immediately and automatically. Initial pilot projects show significantly fewer deviations and savings of thousands of working hours per year – a benefit potential that can be transferred to many video-based monitoring and documentation tasks in buildings and facilities.

The Result – and What Other Industries Can Learn From It

Today, 25 sites in five countries operate on the unified standard – with 40 to 600 camera channels per site. The system primarily serves process monitoring and documentation; at individual sites, it additionally handles classic building security. The infrastructure is growing along with the company.

The real insight, however, lies in the concept: audit-proof documentation, strict network separation, long-term archiving, central manageability of distributed sites, and clean integration into the existing building technology are requirements that apply far beyond the pharmaceutical industry. Operators in the food and chemical industries, logistics, data centers, energy supply, and other security- or documentation-critical environments face the same questions – and can use the approach described here as a blueprint for their own video technology strategy.