How one of the oldest brands in the cannabis industry stays compliant with state and Federal regulations in an era of rapidly changing video surveillance requirements

2 Minutes

Overview:

To those who don’t subscribe, High Times magazine might sound comical, at best. To those who know it, however, High Times is quite serious. It’s the most established brand in the industry and has been since before most reading this could even spell the word “pot”.

Started as a humble counterculture publication in 1974, High Times Magazine has evolved to be the leading global resource for cannabis news, culture, brands and marijuana legalization laws. With over 5.7 million Facebook followers added to its already large paper subscription base, the High Times brand has been uniquely well- positioned to capitalize on economic opportunities, especially in light of increasingly pro-cannabis support from previously unforeseen sectors such as state and Federal governments, big business and healthcare.

Today, High Times is a rapidly growing network of cannabis dispensaries, the host and creator of industry-leading events,
the producer of globally distributed merchandise, benefactor of international licensing deals and provider of content for millions of fans and supporters across the globe.

Read on...

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State and Federal video surveillance regulations for the cannabis industry include:

Monitoring front/back office activity.
Keeping suspicious activity off-site.
24/7 video surveillance recording.

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Where there’s attention, scrutiny isn’t far behind.

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Challenge:

How can we centralize managing the ever-growing compliance requirements of our budding cannabis enterprises?

Moving fast is an advantage but the technology needs to keep up with the opportunity.

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With the marijauna boom of 2021 and cannabis being legal in over half of the United States, High Times was suddenly faced with several challenges around managing the compliance requirements on the state and Federal levels of their growing cannabis enterprises. This required upgrading their video surveillance system. The old school method of on-premise storage of video surveillance was hard to manage, insecure, prone to outages and limited due to the fact that real-time footage could only be viewed from one control point. With High Times dispensaries and Markets coming online in 2021, it became increasingly important to be able to monitor cameras and access footage 24/7 and be sure that footage is safely stored.

Solution:

As traditional video systems (which house data on physical servers on site) were impossible to manage centrally and insecure due to holes in the firewall, High Times turned to Cloudastructure to partner with an advanced video surveillance supplier. Cloudastructure’s cloud-based system gave High Times’ management 24/7 centralized access to surveillance videos with an easy user interface for quick review, no downtime and cybersecurity. The solution not only ensured compliance but is easily scalable to support High Time’s rapid growth opportunity.

Impact:

“Thanks to Cloudastructure, we can centrally manage all of our video surveillance in a cyber secure location to ensure we are always in compliance with the vast array of state and Federal regulations under which dispensaries must operate.” — X, Executive, High Times

Future Facing:

With thriving retail establishments, intelligent surveillance systems can do much more than what perhaps may be their primary functions around security and compliance. Watch for how High Times uses Cloudastructure’s License Plate Recognition and Facial Recognition solutions, built around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to serve drive-thru, retail and Market customers more quickly while stay

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