When we noticed a Website that mimicked our e-commerce site come up in the search engine's search results, using our popular keywords, we started to suspect an inside job. That site simply looked and felt too much like ours for comfort. We felt someone was trying to copy our methods of marketing and designing our site so they too could reap the fruit of our hard-earned efforts. We decided to monitor our employees and their computers. No sooner than we started monitoring them, we discovered one of our employees was spending the majority of his work hours running his very own business through OUR computer. That's right: we were paying him to compete with us and steal our business! In order to collect evidence, we installed a surveillance system that featured a pair of hidden cameras and a simple DVR. What we saw on these cameras shocked us: the employee was actually stealing products from our inventory to sell on his Website! Needless to say, we used the footage to collect evidence of the embezzlement and the theft to turn the employee to the authorities. We realized from our experience that a good video surveillance system is a necessary component of running our business effectively and efficiently. But we also learned that our security system must be reliable. The system we had purchased hastily was not flexible or convenient for our needs. After some research, we realized that a PC-based surveillance system was far more powerful, flexible and reliable. It allows you to record literally thousands of hours of surveillance footage while providing you with extensive control. Our experience has led us to make such systems available to other business owners and to launch our surveillance system Website--Surveillanceware.com. Sam Hasson is the founder of Surveillanceware.com.