Prerequisites

Summary

Understand who GC Surge is for, required organizational roles, technical and network prerequisites, supported camera brands, and trial limitations. Covers: Who Is GC Surge For, Required Roles, Technical Prerequisites, Network Requirements, Supported Camera Brands, Trial Limitations.

Who Is GC Surge For

GC Surge is built for organizations where alarm volume is too high for manual review of every event. The platform delivers measurable impact when all three entry thresholds are met: 250+ devices per operator (or 63+ equivalent towers per operator), 5,000+ total daily alarms across the centre, and multi-monitor mode (devices or platform generate video alarms — not video-verification-only). Below these thresholds the platform works, but the operational gains are less reliably achieved. The platform serves five customer profiles:

• Security Monitoring Centers — centralized alarm triage operations that monitor large camera fleets and need to scale alarm processing without adding headcount.
• Enterprise Security Teams — internal security departments managing multi-facility camera networks.
• Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) — organizations providing video monitoring as a managed service.
• Security Integrators — companies that install and provision surveillance infrastructure and need a cloud platform without on-premises hardware.
• Hybrid Teams — operations combining internal operators with contracted monitoring on a shared platform.

Required Roles

Two platform roles must be in place before the trial can begin:

• Super Admin — responsible for account setup, site creation, user invitations, and subscription management. Must be available throughout onboarding.
• Operator — reviews and closes alarms in ZenMode. At least 2–3 operators are needed for a meaningful trial evaluation.

Technical Prerequisites

Before starting your trial, confirm the following:

• Devices are installed, powered on, and connected to the internet.
• Devices are a supported brand capable of SMTP or FTP event forwarding (see Supported Camera Brands below).
• Device firmware is reasonably current — outdated firmware can block automatic SMTP configuration.
• You have the following ready before starting: site name, camera brand, and approximate device count per site. If someone else will complete field activation (you are not on-site yourself), also have their name and phone number ready. Keep each site’s physical address on hand for dispatching your on-site contact — it is operational information only and is not a field in GC Surge or the import template.

Device Access Credentials (automatic configuration only)

For the four brands that support automatic configuration — Hikvision, Dahua, AXIS, and NX Witness (including Hanwha and SpykeBox) — GC Surge connects directly to the device to push the alarm-forwarding settings. Have the following credentials ready for each device before you start the onboarding flow:

For unsupported brands or cameras behind a firewall without a public IP, manual SMTP or FTP configuration is used instead — device credentials are not required for that path. See Adding Devices - Universal Device Support for the full connection setup procedure.

Network Requirements

GC Surge uses outbound-only communication. No port forwarding, DDNS, static IP, or dedicated network configuration is required at your site.

• Devices must have outbound access on port 587 (SMTP via TLS) or the configured FTP port.
• DNS must resolve: smtp.zeptomail.eu and the GC Surge cloud ingest endpoint.
• No firewall rules blocking outbound TCP on port 587.

Supported Camera Brands

GC Surge connects to devices from 23+ vendors via SMTP, FTP, or webhook — no hardware replacement required. All use SMTP via ZeptoMail (smtp.zeptomail.eu, port 587, TLS) as the standard forwarding path. For four of them — Hikvision, Dahua, AXIS, and NX Witness — GC Surge configures this automatically during onboarding when the device is reachable on a public IP. All other brands are supported via manual SMTP or FTP configuration.

1. Hikvision
2. Dahua
3. AXIS
4. NX Witness / SpykeBox / Hanwha

Hanwha and SpykeBox cameras run on the NX Witness platform — select NX Witness as the brand when adding them.

Trial Limitations

The free trial runs for 7 days. During this period the following limits apply:

• Device limit: Maximum 10 devices per trial account.
• NOVA99x filtering is always active. It applies automatically to all devices from the moment they are connected — no configuration or enabling is required.
• Credit card: Not required at sign-up. A valid credit card must be on file to continue the trial. Adding a payment method after the trial ends reactivates the subscription. See Subscription Lifecycle — Trial to Paid for full trial terms.