Page 16 - Security Today, December 2017

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SECURITY TRENDS
in unique ways, creating hybrid Cloud or on premise deployments. Traditional video surveillance deployments include hardware in- stalled and owned by the consumer. The hardware will have a fixed amount of storage capacity, and consumers generally don’t specify
more storage than is required due to the costs involved.
This traditional model is not very flexible. Often, a consumer’s video retention requirements may change or scene conditions may evolve, affecting how much storage is required to retain video. Consider the example of a school; storage requirements may be low during summer, but when school is in session, the additional scene activity drives camera bitrates higher, necessitating more
storage space.
As such, VMS vendors may offer video archiving services. In-ap-
plication options could allow consumers to pay for additional storage in the Cloud. When local storage is full, video would be uploaded to the Cloud for long term retention. Users can scale their video reten- tion at any time without hardware changes under such a model.
In addition to leveraging Cloud for on-demand storage, cloud could be used for other “hybrid” applications, such as processing video analytics or simplified remote access.
In the case of processing for video analytics, recorded video could be uploaded to the cloud for processing and analysis, in- stead of having a server onsite to perform processing. This model could be useful in several ways. Take the example of a chain of retail stores: It may be desirable to process a camera’s recordings to generate a heat map, showing customer traffic patterns throughout the day. Uploading video to the Cloud for processing eliminates the capital investment in extra hardware needed to process the video. Additionally, if the retailer wants to process either a different set
of, or more, cameras, on-premise hardware may not scale to the new demands. Using the Cloud, additional computing power can be obtained on-demand.
Finally, VMS providers could offer simplified remote access setup using a Cloud service. Remote access to a traditionally deployed vid- eo security system involves either using a VPN or setting up Port For- warding and Dynamic DNS, both of which involve setup complex- ity and additional time for installation and configuration. Instead, a VMS provider could offer a Cloud service the VMS is preconfigured to connect to. The Cloud service would have a pre-established con- nection to the local VMS server which would allow the Cloud ser- vice to notify the VMS of requests for video from remote clients. This configuration would eliminate the need for port forwarding and DDNS or VPN setup because clients would not be making inbound connection requests to the on-premise VMS servers.
The End Result
Competitive differentiation and market demand constantly drive in- novation in VMS products. More intelligent, secure, and flexible sys- tems seem to be the current direction for enterprise VMS technology. These advancements will be enabled by co-processing technology integration, creative leveraging of the Cloud, and
Go to sp.hotims.com and enter 10 for product information.
market demand for highly secure systems. The outcome will be systems that can do more and be easily expanded at lower cost for consumers.
Brian Carle is the director of product strategy at Salient, and the author of Understanding Video Management Systems, published on Amazon.
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