Page 50 - Security Today, March 2019

the more the storage expense will grow. This is the reason systems are still thought of as a VMS and not a DCD with video, audio and metadata as the collected end product. Take your local supermarket for example. As much as it would love to store data for three years to match the state’s slip and fall statute, the cost is simply prohibitive. To add to that problem, finding space for the hardware and maintain- ing the system simply makes it more difficult to reach that lofty goal, so the majority do not even try. The use of the “cloud” is expensive and added to that is the cost of bandwidth needed to deliver video streams to that cloud.
Recognize that your current video surveillance system can deliver value and accrue real revenue. Stop thinking of it as just an expense. Empower each camera on your system to become a data collection device with potential to deliver massive returns. This can be achieved while simplifying the installation of the system, decreasing the amount of equipment needed, and dramatically reducing the need to spend capital expense on hardware. Instead, a minimum capital ex- pense can be undertaken, and the entire system can be run as an op- erational expense with a monthly cost. Data collected can be stored forever, and the end user can participate in revenues derived from the rental of the data to approved third parties.
Even if a system is currently in place and local storage is in opera- tion, all of the above can be accomplished with nothing more than a simple add-on to the system.
As an owner of a video surveillance camera, this is your data, plain and simple, and it is an asset that is yours to use. You own it. You should see a return which is no different than having a retail consultant suggest new items for the “impulse-buy” rack and seeing those products sell faster and at higher revenues.
Millions of businesses are allowing money to be thrown away at the end of a retention period. This can be prevented with very little expense and without upsetting a current operating system.
Cloud storage is clearly a part of this positive solution, but such storage has a reputation for being too expensive. Of course, many cloud services want to be the entire front end by taking your camera at 30 fps and 2MP and storing it for you. With this, the cost to store seven days is somewhat high and the idea of providing 30 days, to say nothing of three years, is insurmountable for the average business owner. This does not show any creativity! Why store at 30 FPS and 2MP for 30 days when you can reduce both of these dramatically to save on storage costs within the cloud? Why not focus on high resolu- tion for seven days and then decrease both after those seven days?
As an industry we have been taught, and almost wholly brain- washed, to think that storage has to be expensive. We have been told the cloud doesn’t work for long-term IP cameras, or large quantities of IP cameras. We have been trained to see that we collect video from the system and, if we don’t need it to review something that occurred during the retention period, we toss that video (much like the idea of motion detection, which was created to save on storage) and start over. While this is old school thinking and may have served us well at one point, new technologies and new systems have
evolved which allow us to store data for as long as we wish, and to use that data to create real value for the end user and partners.
You have a data collection system—don’t you think it should be making you money?
Scott Seraboff is the CEO at ACKData Inc.
DATA STORAGE
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