There’s a control room in East Memphis where six operators watch 340 camera feeds simultaneously. They cover parking lots in Nashville, construction sites in Chattanooga, a car dealership in Jackson, and a dozen apartment complexes scattered across Shelby County. When motion triggers an alert on one of those feeds, the operator pulls it up full-screen, evaluates the situation, and either dispatches a response or activates a two-way speaker to challenge whoever just walked into frame.
No guard drives to the site. No one physically patrols the lot. A person sitting in a chair 200 miles away handles it.
This is remote monitoring, and COVID turned it from a niche offering into one of the fastest-growing segments of Tennessee’s security industry.
The Staffing Problem Created the Opening
Tennessee security companies have struggled to hire guards all year. The reasons are well-documented at this point: low wages competing with unemployment benefits and Amazon warehouse jobs, COVID risk on post, high turnover that was already endemic before the pandemic made everything worse. Companies across the state report turning away contracts because they can’t staff them.
Remote monitoring doesn’t solve the labor problem entirely, and nobody credible claims it does. What it offers is a way to cover sites that would otherwise go unprotected while companies scramble for bodies. A virtual guard monitoring cameras from a central station can watch four or five locations at once. That same coverage with physical guards would require four or five separate people, each earning $10 to $12 an hour, each needing a background check, uniform, and training.
The math is compelling. A virtual guard service typically bills between $8 and $10 per hour per site. A physical guard post runs $18 to $22 per hour billed to the client, once you factor in wages, payroll taxes, workers’ comp insurance, and the security company’s margin. For a site that needs overnight coverage seven days a week, the annual cost difference can exceed $40,000.
“We’re not replacing guards,” said the operations director at a Memphis-based monitoring company. “We’re covering the shifts nobody wants to work. Midnight to 6 a.m. on a Wednesday at an empty construction site? Good luck finding a human who’ll show up for that reliably. A camera never calls in sick.”
SentryNet and the Memphis Connection
Memphis has a quiet claim as a hub for remote monitoring technology. SentryNet, one of the larger wholesale monitoring centers in the country, operates its headquarters here. The company provides backend monitoring services to security dealers and integrators nationwide, processing alarm signals, video verification, and dispatch services from its Memphis facility.
SentryNet’s leadership has spoken publicly about the demand spike this year. Video verification requests, where an operator views camera footage to confirm whether an alarm represents a real threat before dispatching police, have increased substantially since March. The logic behind the growth is straightforward: police departments across Tennessee have reduced responses to unverified alarms, so verification has become essential rather than optional.
Other Tennessee companies have entered the remote monitoring space more recently. Nashville-based security integrators who previously focused on installing camera systems now offer monitoring as a recurring service. A Knoxville company that started as a locksmith expanded into video monitoring for retail clients. The barriers to entry are lower than in traditional guard services. You need cameras (which most commercial properties already have), a monitoring platform (several cloud-based options exist at reasonable cost), and trained operators.
What Virtual Patrol Actually Looks Like
The term “virtual guard” gets thrown around loosely, so it’s worth describing what happens in practice.
A typical virtual patrol works like this: cameras at a client site are connected to a central monitoring station via the internet. The monitoring software uses motion detection, analytics, or scheduled check-ins to direct operator attention to specific feeds at specific times. At 11 p.m., the system might prompt an operator to do a “virtual walkthrough” of a parking garage, cycling through 12 camera views in sequence. If the operator spots someone who shouldn’t be there, options include activating a loudspeaker (“Attention: you are on private property and being recorded”), triggering strobe lights, and calling local police or a mobile patrol unit.
More advanced setups use video analytics that can distinguish between a person, a vehicle, and an animal. This reduces false alerts from raccoons, blowing debris, and other nuisance triggers that plague basic motion detection. Some systems can identify specific behaviors: loitering, perimeter breach, a vehicle moving the wrong direction in a one-way lot. These analytics cost more, and they’re not perfect, especially in poor lighting or bad weather. They’re getting better, though.
The two-way audio feature is surprisingly effective as a deterrent. Something about a disembodied voice telling you to leave creates a different kind of discomfort than seeing a camera and wondering whether anyone is watching. Several operators I spoke with said that audio challenges resolve 70% to 80% of trespassing incidents without any further action needed. The person hears the warning and leaves.
Where It Works
Remote monitoring performs best at sites with clear sightlines, decent lighting, and limited entry points. Construction sites after hours are an ideal application. So are car dealerships, storage facilities, parking garages, and commercial properties that sit empty overnight.
Retail clients with strong existing camera infrastructure can add monitoring relatively easily. A shopping center that already has 40 cameras covering its parking lots and common areas just needs connectivity and a monitoring contract. The cameras are doing double duty: recording for liability purposes during the day, providing live monitoring coverage at night.
Apartment complexes are a growing market. Property managers who can’t afford 24/7 guard coverage often opt for monitored cameras at entry gates, parking areas, and common spaces. The cost fits tighter budgets, and residents feel reassured knowing someone is watching the cameras rather than having them just record footage nobody reviews until after an incident.
Industrial facilities, warehouses, and distribution centers have adopted remote monitoring faster than almost any other sector. Memphis, with its concentration of logistics operations along the I-55 and I-40 corridors, represents a natural market. These properties tend to be large, have defined perimeters, and experience most of their security concerns after business hours when few employees are on-site.
Where It Falls Short
The most obvious limitation: a camera can observe. It can’t intervene. If someone decides to ignore the loudspeaker warning and continue breaking into a vehicle, the monitoring operator’s options are limited to calling police and recording evidence. Response time from Memphis PD on a property crime call can run 30 minutes to an hour or longer, depending on priority and available units. A lot can happen in that window.
This gap is where physical guards retain irreplaceable value. A uniformed officer standing in a lobby or walking a parking lot creates a deterrent that cameras can’t fully replicate. The physical presence of a human being, someone who can ask questions, challenge unauthorized individuals face-to-face, and physically control access, does things that technology hasn’t figured out how to replace.
Certain environments resist remote monitoring entirely. Locations with heavy foot traffic need human judgment to distinguish between normal activity and suspicious behavior. A camera watching a busy hospital entrance can’t tell the difference between a confused visitor and someone who shouldn’t be there. A guard can.
Interior security, where access control and visitor management matter, remains a human function. Reception desks, lobby checkpoints, loading docks where deliveries need verification: these require a person. No amount of camera analytics substitutes for a guard who can check an ID, ask a question, and make a judgment call.
Weather and connectivity create technical limitations too. Camera feeds depend on internet connections that can drop during storms. Outdoor cameras in Tennessee deal with heat, humidity, ice, and the kind of afternoon thunderstorms that roll through Memphis from June through September. Hardened equipment handles most of this, and the cost of ruggedized outdoor cameras with cellular backup connectivity is dropping. It’s still a consideration, especially for temporary installations at construction sites.
The Hybrid Model
The most practical approach, and the one gaining the most traction among Tennessee security companies, combines remote monitoring with mobile patrol. A monitoring operator watches cameras overnight. When the operator detects an issue that requires physical response, they dispatch a mobile patrol unit from a nearby area.
This hybrid model costs more than pure remote monitoring and less than dedicated on-site guards. For a commercial property that needs overnight coverage, a monitoring contract plus two or three mobile patrol visits per night might run $12 to $15 per hour equivalent. That’s a meaningful savings compared to stationing a guard on-site for eight hours.
Several Memphis-area companies now structure their service offerings around this combination. The monitoring provides constant coverage. The mobile patrol provides the physical response capability that cameras alone can’t deliver. Clients who balked at the cost of a full-time guard find the hybrid option affordable, and those who tried going without any coverage after COVID reduced their security budgets are coming back to this as a compromise.
Tennessee’s Regulatory Gap
Tennessee licenses security guards through the Private Protective Services division under the Department of Commerce and Insurance. The licensing framework covers armed and unarmed officers, private investigators, and alarm system contractors. What it doesn’t address clearly is the growing category of remote monitoring operators who perform security functions from a central station.
Are these operators “guards” under Tennessee law? They don’t carry weapons. They don’t physically patrol. They sit at desks. Yet they make security decisions, interact with people via audio, and dispatch responses. The regulatory framework hasn’t caught up with the technology, and as remote monitoring grows, this ambiguity creates potential liability questions for both providers and clients.
Other states have begun addressing this gap. Whether Tennessee follows will likely depend on how quickly the industry grows and whether any high-profile incidents force the legislature’s hand.
The Trajectory
Remote monitoring won’t replace physical guards. That prediction has been made and proven wrong for decades in other industries, and security is no different. What it will do is absorb some of the demand that the guard shortage can’t meet, particularly for overnight and weekend coverage at commercial properties.
COVID accelerated this adoption curve by two or three years. Companies that were considering remote monitoring as a future investment deployed it in weeks when they couldn’t staff guard posts. Many of those deployments will become permanent. The clients got used to the lower cost. The coverage proved adequate for their needs. Going back to a full-time guard at twice the price is a hard sell when the cameras did the job.
Tennessee’s security industry in September 2020 is grappling with a question it didn’t expect to face this soon: how much of what guards do can be done remotely, and what’s the right balance between technology and human presence? The answer varies by site, by client, by budget, and by risk tolerance. For now, the market is sorting it out in real time, contract by contract, one camera feed at a time.