Thieves take the recorder. This isn’t hypothetical — a local-only system in that scenario records the entire burglary and then leaves with the burglars. Fire destroys everything in the building, including the evidence. Drives fail under sustained write load.

Cloud storage removes all three failure modes at once. Whatever happens to your building, the footage is somewhere else.

Upload bandwidth is a real constraint. Business internet in Arizona is frequently asymmetric — fast down, much slower up. We calculate your actual requirement during design.

Ongoing subscription cost continues for as long as you have the system.

Retention economics. Long retention at high resolution costs more in the cloud than on local drives.