Retained lawfully. Released under control.
Surveillance creates a compliance problem before it creates a security one. Footage accumulates faster than budgets allow, retention periods drift, and access is rarely logged. Under POPIA, all three are liabilities.
Recent footage. Immediate review, live search, event investigation.
Moved to long-term storage at a fraction of the cost. Held only as long as required.
Five business days' notice. Authority verified, scope confirmed, every release logged.
Automatic deletion at the end of the agreed retention period. No indefinite accumulation.
Two tiers. One cost model that works.
Dragonfruit's platform manages the movement between tiers, using AI-driven lifecycle management to place footage in hot or cold storage based on need. You stop paying premium rates to store months of empty corridors.
Active tier
Recent footage held for immediate review, live search, and event investigation. This is where your operational value sits, and where our monitoring team works day to day.
Archive tier
Everything beyond the active window, moved to long-term storage at a fraction of the cost. Retained for as long as your compliance obligation requires, and not one day longer.
A controlled release, not an open door
Requests for archived footage are submitted to Kevlar Monitoring through a formal retrieval request with five business days' notice. That interval is deliberate — it is what turns a video file into evidence.
- Verify the requester's authority to receive the material
- Confirm the lawful basis for release
- Scope the request to the specific cameras and time window required
- Apply redaction where third parties appear in frame
- Log the request, the authorisation, the material released, and the recipient
Expedited path. SAPS production orders, court directives, and data subject access requests under section 23 of POPIA follow an accelerated route, where statutory timelines override standard process.
Independently audited, end to end
Dragonfruit AI Inc. holds a SOC 2 Type II report on its Video Intelligence Platform, covering the Security trust services criterion, following examination of control design and operating effectiveness over a twelve-month period.
Amazon Web Services, separately certified to SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and ISO 27017.
Encrypted in transit and at rest.
Authenticated, role-based, and every retrieval logged.
The SOC 2 Type II report is available to clients on request, under non-disclosure agreement.
We tell you where your footage lives
Your footage is stored in the region it is retrieved from. We disclose the full picture — including the parts most providers leave out — because your obligation as Responsible Party depends on knowing it.
In-country
Footage recorded in South Africa is held in South Africa, and retrieved from South Africa.
Disaster recovery
Backup replication is held in the United States. This constitutes a cross-border transfer under section 72 of POPIA, and is addressed in your Operator Agreement through binding contractual protections substantially similar to POPIA, including restrictions on onward transfer.
Built to the obligation, not around it
Retention periods are set against a stated, documented purpose — not against available storage.
Footage is automatically purged at the end of the agreed retention period.
Every retrieval is recorded. You can demonstrate who accessed what, when, and why.
Kevlar Coastal (Pty) Ltd, trading as Kevlar Monitoring, operates as your Operator under a written agreement covering security safeguards, breach notification, and the limits of our processing.
Cross-border transfer obligations are addressed contractually and disclosed to you in writing before deployment.
Against an on-premise NVR
Dragonfruit's Split AI architecture balances edge and cloud processing to reduce bandwidth consumption — which matters when your site runs on LTE, a constrained fibre link, or through load-shedding. Footage uploads without saturating the connection your operation depends on.
| On-premise NVR | Kevlar Monitoring | |
|---|---|---|
| Capital outlay | Recurring hardware refresh | None |
| Failure risk | Site theft, fire, drive failure | Off-site, redundant |
| Retention proof | Manual, contested | Logged and auditable |
| Long-term cost | Scales with every camera | Archive tier drops sharply |
| Access control | Local, often shared | Authenticated and recorded |
Priced against your requirement
Storage is priced per camera, per month, tiered by retention period and resolution. Archive retrieval is quoted separately. Because retention obligations, camera counts, and bandwidth conditions vary significantly by site, we price against your actual requirement rather than a published rate card.
Pricing on request
Every deployment starts with a retention assessment: what you are required to keep, for how long, and on what lawful basis. We build the storage schedule — and the quote — from that answer.
Request a retention assessment