Need a Security Monitoring Company That Accepts VPN'ed Video Feeds

mache writes: My cousin is finishing up a major remodel of his home in Houston and has installed video cameras for added security. At my suggestion, he wired up all the cameras to be on a separate VLAN that only uses wired Ethernet and has no WiFi access. Since the Houston police will only respond to security alarms if the monitoring company is viewing the crime in progress, he must arrange for the video feed to available to a security monitoring company.

I told him that the feed should use VPN or some other encrypted tunneling technique as it travels the Internet to the monitoring company and we proceeded to try and find a company that supported those protocols. No one I have talked to understands the importance of securing a video feed and everyone so far blithely suggests that we just open a port on his home router. Its frustrating to see such willful ignorance about Internet security.

Does anyone know of a security monitoring company that we can work with that has a clue?

browser-based tunnel

[apraetor]

Why not use a browser-based VPN client which could be hosted on a server of your choosing, on- or off-premises? The alarm company would just log into the client, a tunnel set up, and the returned webpage would be the monitoring page for video cameras.

Re:

[apraetor]

Depending on the video monitoring system could you use SSL instead? You are already talking about dealing with a browser-based application; a VPN is great for integrating 3rd-party software which doesn't already support security or needs to think it is on a LAN.