Page 14 - Security Today, December 2017

The Direction of VMS Technology VMS technologies have come a long way over the past five years
BSy Brian Carle
ome of the industry trends which have affected technol- ogy and deployment design include a dramatic cost re- duction in entry level NVRs
and cameras. Merger and acquisition activ- ity is reducing the number of independent technology vendors and driving popularity of single source technology providers and server hardware lines by VMS providers are now commonplace, allowing consumers to obtain the complete recording platform from a single vendor.
What might the next few years look like for VMS technology? Herein, we’ll explore trends and the direction technology may take for VMS platforms.
Information Security
Security is the current hot topic for video surveillance and other physical security systems, and for good reason. Several head- line-making network attacks over the past few years have been made possible by secu- rity flaws in internet-connected cameras and DVRs. One notable, recent example is from late 2016. Dyn, a major provider of DNS services on the internet, suffered a sustained Distributed Denial of Service attack, main- ly from compromised IP cameras and DVR/ NVR devices.
Emerging from these events, VMS ven- dors and security consumers see information security features as strategic and differentiat- ing advantages. Some information security technologies which will become more com- monplace VMS features.
• Encryption for system configuration files,
communications, and authentication. System passwords and other sensitive configuration information is at risk when stored and transported. If authentication or configuration information is either intercepted during transport over the network or copied from a VMS client or server system, encryption will protect the contents, making them unusable to those without the encryption key.
• Encrypted video storage prevents video on a stolen hard drive from being read- able. If a malicious actor has removed video storage drives after gaining physi- cal access to a system, the recorded video will not be usable.
• Two factor authentication provides an additional verification step to validate that the user name and password entered matches the person attempting to authen-
ticate. In the event a password is used by an unauthorized individual, the second authentication factor should prevent the individual from logging into the VMS.
• Encrypted export: Exported video is most at risk of being stolen. The export- ed video is often physically removed from the organization’s building, and there is no log of the access to the exported clips. If the media is lost, any individual can view the video, upload it to YouTube, provide it to the evening news, etc. As such, encrypting exported video ensures only authorized individuals with the en- cryption key will be able to view and use the export.
• Automatic system patching or in-appli- cation update reminders.
Co-processor Integration
Video surveillance is becoming a much more processor-intensive application. Many fac- tors contribute to the increased demand for computing power, including increased de- ployments using H.265 compression, 4k cam- era resolution, and increased interest in de- ploying real-time and search based analytics.
VMS Client workstations require sub- stantial computational power to decompress video, scale the video to the screen size, and display it. VMS recording servers may re- quire substantial computational power to process video for motion detection, analyt-
ics, transcoding, or other operations.
To drive down the cost of server hard- ware and increase VMS performance, more VMS platforms will work toward integrat- ing various co-processing technologies. Most common among these co-processing tech- nologies are Graphics Processing Units, or GPUs, which are the processors located on a video card. When a VMS is integrated with such technology, some of the computing work will be processed by the CPU and some by the GPU. Adding in a graphics card with a compatible GPU will increase the comput- ing power of the client workstation or server for much less expense than deploying a sec- ond computer or a more powerful comput-
ing platform that supports multiple CPUs. Other co-processing technologies include Intel’s QuickSync technology as well as FPGA processors. Both of these technolo- gies will likely be less common than GPU
integration.
Leveraging Cloud
Interest in Cloud video surveillance deploy- ments is growing. However, such deploy- ments are frequently limited by bandwidth constraints. The upstream bandwidth avail- able at a deployment site still largely dictates both how many cameras can be deployed, as well as the quality of the video available.
Despite scalability challenges, Cloud may still be leveraged by traditional VMS platforms
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