Verkada sells one of the easiest security platforms in the world to set up. Plug a camera into a PoE port, scan a code, and it appears in Command. There's no recorder to configure and no server to patch. Firmware updates itself.
That simplicity creates a quiet problem. Because the system mostly runs itself, nobody is assigned to run it. It was installed by a contractor who has moved on, handed to an office manager or an IT person with forty other responsibilities, and checked only when something has already gone wrong. By then the footage you need may not exist.
These are the six issues we find most often when we audit a Verkada system that nobody has been looking after.
1. Cameras that have been offline for weeks
Command will tell you when a camera goes offline, but only if the alert is going to someone who reads it. We routinely find cameras that dropped off after a switch was replaced, a cable was damaged during a renovation, or a PoE budget was exceeded when new devices were added. The dashboard has been showing it the whole time. No one was looking.
2. A view that no longer shows what matters
Cameras get bumped by ladders, blocked by new signage, and coated with a season of dust and spider webs. Outdoor domes are especially prone to haze that turns night footage into glare. A camera can be online and recording perfectly while capturing nothing useful. The fix is a physical visit: clean, refocus, re-aim, and compare the view against what the camera was installed to see.
3. Licences about to lapse
Every Verkada device needs an active licence. Organizations that added cameras in stages often have licences expiring on several different dates, and renewal notices that go to an inbox nobody monitors. Tracking those dates, lining them up to a single renewal, and budgeting for it in advance is basic housekeeping that rarely gets done.
4. Former staff who still have access
This is the one that worries boards and owners most once they see it. People leave, and their Command accounts stay active, sometimes with full administrator rights and access to live video from their phone. A quarterly review of who has access, at what level, and whether two-factor authentication is switched on takes less than an hour and closes a real hole.
5. Alerts nobody trusts
Out of the box, motion alerts can be noisy. After a few weeks of notifications about headlights and tree branches, people mute them. Verkada has good tools for this, including person and vehicle detection, activity zones, line crossing, and schedules, but someone has to tune them to the site and revisit them when the site changes. Fewer, better alerts are the difference between a system that warns you and one that only records.
6. No one knows how to pull footage properly
When an incident happens, the person who needs the clip is often not the person who knows the system. Footage gets screen-recorded on a phone instead of archived, which hurts its value for police and insurers. Archiving the right clip, from the right cameras, with the timeline intact, and sharing it through a proper link is a small skill that matters a great deal on the one day you need it.
What a managed care plan changes
None of these problems are faults with Verkada. They are what happens to any system without an owner. A managed care plan gives it one.
With KingsGuard's Verkada Managed Care, you add us as an administrator on your Command organization. You stay the owner and can remove us at any time. From there we monitor device health, fix issues remotely or send a technician, handle warranty replacements under Verkada's 10-year hardware warranty, track your licences, review user access every quarter, tune alerts, make preventive site visits, and retrieve footage when you ask for it. If you want eyes on the cameras as well, live monitoring can be added on top.
It doesn't matter who installed your system. If it's Verkada and it's in Ontario, we can look after it.
Want to know what shape your system is in? Book a free Verkada health audit and we'll send you a written findings report, whether or not you sign up for anything.
- Verkada
- Managed Care
- Maintenance
- Ontario