Giraffe Software
Your remote surveillance CCTV tower product reimagined.
Complete control, brilliantly simple, minimal training.
What is the Giraffe
platform?
The Giraffe platform is much more than just a VMS (video management system).
The Giraffe Platform is an easy-to-use cloud based remote tower management system capable of being operated from any internet enabled device without any training or experience.
From a single holistic dashboard, you can view all your cameras, be alerted to any intrusions and see the overall health of your remote CCTV tower.
We believe your tower should be easy to setup, control and manage and that is exactly what the Giraffe Platform allows you to do.
From an internet browser you can view or play back your cameras, control the siren, speaker, floodlight & strobe from the same screen as managing your team permissions. You can view all your towers from different sites in a single location.
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Cloud Based Software
Manage all your towers from a single login.
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Easy To Use
No configuration or training necessary.
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Artificial Intelligence
AI processing done at the ‘edge’ and built into the tower.
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Safe & Secure
User permissions, 2 factor authentication and SSL security.
Not convinced?
Click here to find out more about the differences when comparing to legacy software.
Total Control & Visibility
Giraffe believes that all the systems inside a CCTV tower need to work symbiotically together.
You want to be able to monitor how the solar is performing, configure PTZ presets and PIR sensors, setup schedules, configure the network connection and setup the AI without going through different systems.
If you are having problems, you can remotely diagnose, reboot, or reset devices remotely.
And it’s all really easy for even a non-technical user to manage.
Notifications & Alerts
Your customers want to know when there is something happening on their site.
With Giraffe, they can configure exactly which events they are alerted on. If they only care about people being detected after 10PM at night, they can do that.
Importantly, they will also get alerts for serious potential issues such as a low battery or system faults.
Solar Powered Systems
The Giraffe system has a deep integration with Victron solar chargers, battery shunts and mains chargers.
The system will monitor the data coming from the Victron devices using a serial connection and display it in real time on the system status page. You can see exactly how much power is being generated, the state of the batteries and how much power the tower is using.
The system will also archive the data to the cloud, allowing you to review graphs and charts historically. This is incredibly useful for remotely troubleshooting and diagnosing problems with systems.
The solar integration is integral to our platform, and does not rely on any third party hardware or software. Simply connect the Victron devices via the VE.Direct ports!
Cloud Computing,
Secure By Design
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Core Competency
Giraffe's only business is looking after your security system. It's literally core to our business. We don't take shortcuts.
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Industry Standards
We follow all the industry best practices and use existings, battle tested components where possible.
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SSL Encrypytion
Video streams are encrypted from end to end and transported over WebRTC. Much more secure than unencrypted RTSP streams.
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Zero-Trust Architecture
Zero trust is simply another way of saying, “never trust, always verify” in order to protect digital environments. Giraffe’s cloud approach adopts this model. VPNs and private APNs are not necessary secure if the wrong people gain access.
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Where is your data stored?
Some people are suspcious about uploading important data to 'the cloud', but the same people are happy to have an unecrypted hard drive storing surveillance footage left unprotected in a CCTV tower? Go figure.
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Multi Factor Authentication (MFA)
Logins that rely on usernames and passwords will get hacked as a result of human operators doing silly things. Multi factor authentication such as one time passwords sent via SMS massively decrease the risk of social engineering attacks.
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Reduced Surface Area
Our cloud platform reduces the surface area for attacks because the entry points are very well defined and can be locked down. Contrast this to a typical NVR with port forwarding setup.
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Automatic Updates
Cloud means your system is never out of date and always in receipt of the latest security patches with no intervention on your behalf.
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Private Clouds
Some organisations, for their own reasons, insist upon hosting all their infrastructure in their own 'private cloud'. Giraffe can facililate this if required.
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We're UK owned (not Chinese...)
Giraffe is proud to be a UK based company. Do you really want the Chinese Communist Party to be ultimately in control of the software running on your CCTV system?
Cloud Recording
All of our cameras record 24/7 to an internal solid state drive.
You can easily play back the footage by going to the web app and selecting the appropriate point on the timeline. The footage is then streamed from the tower directly to your device.
The footage can also be exported and saved to your local computer, either via the web interface, or if you have lots of footage to export in bulk, by connecting a USB stick directly to the device.
A really useful feature is being able to quickly scrub through snapshot images for events of interest.
Off the shelf AI in the camera is a second best solution.
Powerful Artificial Intelligence
Are you fed up with false detections from your “AI”? There is no point getting hundreds of false detections as the one that matters will be missed.
Giraffe uses the powerful Google Coral processor and industry leading AI models to filter out almost all false alarms before they even get sent.
Using a proprietary tracking algorithm, we only send events for objects of interest when they move. You will not get false alerts for stationary cars or objects that sometimes appear to look like a person.
Off the shelf AI in the camera is a second best solution.
Alarms and Automation
You can control the tower manually, but it’s more powerful if it can take automated actions when it senses something is amiss.
Battery operated PIR sensors can trigger PTZ presets which will allow you to cover a much larger area with a single tower.
The AI can trigger siren, strobe, floodlight or speaker activations when a vehicle or person is detected moving as well as sending alerts.
Schedules can be configured to automatically arm and disarm the system, or turn the floodlights on overnight.
Alarm Receiving Centre Integration
We have a simple and straightforward integration with leading central station monitoring software providers.
You can grant full control of the tower to your preferred monitoring station, with almost zero setup or configuration.
Or you can simply monitor your tower yourself, with our own alarm view page.
From our CCTV Engineering blog
Solar powered CCTV tower design - Part 1 - design considerations
In the previous post, we did some calculations to work out how much power we needed to run our CCTV tower all year round. In this post, we are going to briefly discuss battery choices.
Continue reading...