City of Elche, Spain

Located near the Mediterranean Coast, Elche, Spain is city of 234,000 inhabitants. It is famous for its large shoemaking industry and for the Palmeral Park, a vast grove of palm trees dating back to the Roman Times.

Today, the city has 104 cameras used to secure its populace and official buildings, for traffic monitoring, police support. The security system is overseen by the city’s IT department,  which wanted to be recognized in Spain as using the most advanced technology to provide service to its citizens.

Managing security incidents using complex IT systems had been an ongoing challenge for the city’s IT staff. When the pandemic hit, city employees began working at home, and it became clear many of the systems could not be managed remotely.

City officials decided to update their video surveillance system with the following objectives in mind:

• Ease of use
• City-wide security camera visibility
• Remote access to video
• Instant notifications and alerts of security incidents
• Capable of sharing images with police and other city departments
• Simple and inexpensive to maintain
• Flexible and scalable

Fortunately, the Eagle Eye Networks Cloud Video Management System (VMS) could repurpose the city’s existing cameras – even though they were from different manufacturers; storage retention requirements were easily met; and, different camera resolutions (depending on the camera and location) were quickly set up. In all, this project involved moving 100 cameras to the cloud.

In the next five years, the city plans to expand the award-winning system, applying artificial intelligence (AI) to better investigate incidents. The city will use parking and traffic flow data from the system for city planning and infrastructure improvement. There will also be direct integrations with the police and fire department to accelerate incident response.

The project was done together with reseller Aryse Infraestructuras and was awarded with best security project in Spain in 2021 by Cuadernos de Seguridad and Security Forum.