Synology has spent nearly two decades selling boxes that sit in a closet and record video. On July 24, it decided that closet is optional. The Taiwanese company launched Surveillance365, a Video Surveillance as a Service (VSaaS) platform that moves camera management into the cloud and promises to stand up enterprise-grade, multi-site systems in minutes rather than days.
The pitch is aimed squarely at organizations that have outgrown a single-site NVR: retail chains, construction sites, and corporate offices scattered across cities. Instead of buying and configuring on-premises servers at every location, an administrator manages the entire camera fleet from one web portal or mobile app. Synology says each camera takes as little as two minutes to deploy, with no dedicated IT staff required.
“Ever since we introduced Surveillance Station in 2008, our vision has been to build a private, fully integrated surveillance ecosystem spanning cameras, NVRs, VMS, storage, backup, AI analytics, and cloud, all engineered by one vendor,” said Philip Wong, Chairman and CEO of Synology. “Today, Surveillance365 completes that vision.”
Edge recording, cloud brains
The interesting part is what Synology chose not to push into the cloud. Footage records locally to a microSD card on each camera, and AI analytics — People, Vehicle, Intrusion, and Loitering Detection — run on the camera itself rather than in a data center. That edge-first design keeps immediate alerts fast and keeps bandwidth bills down. Live viewing leans on peer-to-peer local connections, and a Low Bandwidth Mode can cut usage by up to 50 percent with what the company describes as minimal quality loss.
Pricing follows a familiar hook: the Standard Plan is free to use with compatible Synology cameras. A paid Business Plan layers on the governance features larger deployments actually need — granular permission profiles, site-level camera management, and a full audit log. Synology also leans on compliance as a selling point, noting its cameras are NDAA and TAA compliant, language that matters to government buyers wary of certain foreign-made hardware.
On security, access is gated behind multi-factor authentication and a C2 Encryption Key held only by the account holder. Optional cloud backup to C2 OneStorage supports retention from 45 days out to a decade, and can also protect existing Surveillance Station recordings on Synology NAS units.
The move makes strategic sense. VSaaS is one of the fastest-growing corners of physical security, and rivals like Verkada and Eagle Eye Networks have built real businesses on cloud-managed cameras. Synology’s advantage is that it already sells the whole stack; the question is whether existing customers want to fold a subscription into what was traditionally a one-time hardware purchase. For now, Surveillance365 is available globally, and there is a genuinely free tier to test that pitch.
