Case Study: George Watson’s College achieves modernised CCTV and safer, simpler campus monitoring with Cisco Meraki smart cameras

Revolutionising safety in education with a cutting-edge camera solution

George Watson's College, a large independent day school in Edinburgh with about 2,500 pupils, 20 campus buildings and roughly 3,000 daily passersby, was operating an aging CCTV estate of 50 coaxial cameras tied to five storage servers that required frequent software renewals and was increasingly failing. To modernize and simplify surveillance, the college evaluated vendors and chose Cisco Meraki’s Meraki Smart Camera (MV) solution after a successful trial.

Cisco Meraki deployed cloud-managed MV smart cameras—initially nine units installed by two AV specialists in under two days—providing onboard video storage, an intuitive Meraki dashboard with video wall, footfall analytics and motion search, plus optional cloud archiving. The Cisco Meraki solution made monitoring accessible via smartphone and desktop, sped up evidence export for police, reduced reliance on central servers and maintenance overhead, and delivered faster incident review and operational insights for IT, Facilities and Health & Safety teams.

George Watson's College

Chris McMorris

Senior Technical Lead