Shaner Hotel Group

Headquartered in State College, Pennsylvania, Shaner Hotel Group is an award-winning hotel developer, owner, and operator in the global  hospitality industry. The company manages an expansive portfolio of 52  properties across the United States, the Bahamas, Italy, and Greece that  include Marriott, IHG, Hilton, InterContinental Choice, and independent  hotel brands.

Through continuous growth and innovation, their  mission is to deliver extraordinary experiences for guests, solid  financial results for owners and partners and a great work environment  for associates.

Steve  Shala, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Shaner Hotels,  oversees all technology that supports business operations across 52  hotel properties. Following staffing reductions due to COVID-19, his  bootstrapped team of 4 found that managing physical security and camera  systems was a challenge.

With limited access to footage offsite,  remotely supporting staff with video requests across 17 states was a  complicated and timely endeavor. Because the security setup varied  across the properties, figuring out how to get into each camera system  to locate footage was tedious and not scalable for the small team.

“We’d  spend hours trying to fulfill a simple retrieval request. We had to  tinker with firewall settings to get into the platform, then we’d have  to download large batches of footage, manually scrub through video to  find the incident, then convert the clip to a readable format. There  wasn’t an easy way to get footage into the right hands.”

Additionally,  the NVR systems had limited storage capacity and frequently experienced undetected downtime. “I started looking for a camera solution that’d be  easy to use and access.”

“I  remember my first demo… I was sent a Verkada live link and in a matter  of seconds, I was looking at a feed of (Verkada’s) kitchen straight from  my mobile browser. It blew me away. I asked, ‘how much do these cameras  cost and how fast can I get them?’”

The ability to access cameras across all hotel locations from Command,  Verkada’s cloud-based platform, convinced Shala that Verkada would  streamline security and reduce management overhead for his team. “If I  could describe Verkada in five words, it would be ‘seamless video access  from anywhere.’ Whether I’m on the go, or at my desk, I’m able to get  to what I need from my phone or desktop.”

“Finding  and sharing footage of an event takes a few clicks and a matter of  minutes. Not only does it save the IT team time, it saves the broader  team time because they’re able to resolve those incidents faster.”

To  gain remote access to the legacy systems, Shala needed to open firewall  ports—a practice he avoids if possible to prevent network  vulnerabilities. “With static IPs, you’re already susceptible to bad  actors trying to access your network remotely. Once you open up ports,  that’s another line of defense down. It’s impossible to know what your  network might be exposed to.

”With Verkada, outbound connections are sent only over HTTPS/SSL via Port 443.  When footage retrieval requests come in, he can enable secure remote  access quickly and easily—without the risk of opening firewalls or port  forwarding.

G2 designs, configures and deploys the PoE network switches to ensure the Verkada Camera Systems is on a secure dedicated VLAN network separate from the Guest Wi-Fi services.

“Our  IT team is no longer the bottleneck because we’ve giving managers the  tools they need to retrieve footage themselves. If I could quantify time  savings, it’d be about 98%.”

By setting up user  groups and splitting up cameras by sites and sub-sites, Shala has given  the risk management team, front desk faculty and managing staff varying  levels of access to cameras within their purview. With powerful search  filters, the team can quickly identify people of interest, find footage  of specific vehicles or detect unusual activity during off hours.

“The  software capabilities have grown significantly since we first installed  the cameras. We’re notified of updates directly in the platform with an  overview of how to use new features to surface events faster.”

“With  the old system, there was no way of knowing that a camera had fallen  offline until we needed to review footage—and by then, it’d be too late.  With Verkada, we know that everything is working unless we get an alert  that tells us otherwise.”

Many of the legacy NVRs  could only retain up to 36 hours of footage, overriding footage from  just a day or two prior. With Verkada’s hybrid cloud infrastructure,  cameras store up to 365 days of footage locally on solid-state drives  and can be archived indefinitely in Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers.

Should  a camera fall offline due to a network outage or firmware error, Shala  and his team receive an SMS alert notifying them of the issue. “When we  get these notifications, I call G2’s support team and they’re able  to resolve all of our cases remotely. The fact that we don’t have to  call technicians onsite to service the cameras has been a tremendous  cost savings for us.”

Moving  forward, Shala plans to replace the NVR system at the Shaner Group  headquarters with Verkada’s solution to further centralize video  security management. Additionally, the team is looking into integrating  the cloud-based cameras with Verkada’s new access control solution to pair access events with real-time video footage.

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