Cape May County is the southernmost county in the state of New Jersey. With much of the county along a picturesque peninsula that includes 30 miles of sandy beaches, its 95,000 year-round population swells to almost one million during the summer months.

The Cape May County Government is responsible for the operation, safety and security of the County, including sites such as its airport, the Department of Emergency Management, the Sheriff's Department, Superior Court and jail, the Cresthaven Nursing Home, as well as the Cape May County Park & Zoo, which attracts as many as 15,000 visitors each day.

With sites spread out across the county’s 267 square miles, the surveillance challenge became managing a growing network of highly distributed 24/7 surveillance cameras to help keep residents, workers, visitors, the government’s 1,200 members of staff and its infrastructure safe and secure. One complication involved the need for some cameras to be located in rural and low bandwidth areas.

The county turned to a video management system (VMS) from Qognify to unite the disparate network of surveillance cameras. Network Administrator at the County of Cape May, Dan Gilbert, stated, "Every camera needs to be fully operational and recording non-stop, anywhere the public might be, from the play areas in our Zoo to libraries, airports and courts. Our video management system is essential to the performance of the entire network."

Cape May County’s 600 cameras are all IP and predominately from Axis, with a small number from Sony and other manufacturers. These cameras are connected to 11 NVRs and consume in the region of 2.5 petabits of storage, with all footage being stored for a minimum of 60 days.

The county's implementation of Qognify VMS helps them enable 24/7 monitoring and allows county safety personnel to view all feeds from a single console. "The video configurator, administration and ability to view live video is now all in one place," said Gilbert.

Additional features the county may consider include bi-directional integrations with access control and intrusion detection systems, as well as video analytics. Furthermore, as bandwidth increases across the county, it has the option to store video data in the cloud using Qognify Cloud Bridge to reduce its hardware footprint, add even great resiliency and scale its already significant storage requirements as needed.