Page 40 - Security Today, September 2019

The Opportunity of
Hyperconvergence
Holding the key to simplifying surveillance and building systems
BAy Eric Bassier
s security and loss prevention become more critical – and more difficult – airports, public transit, stadiums, universities, hospitals, hotels, casinos, retail stores, restaurants and even entire cities increasingly rely on surveillance footage for new purposes. Now a new IT
trend–“hyperconvergence”–may hold the key to simplifying this task while also enabling significantly more sophisticated ways to tap the value of data many organizations are already collecting.
Major Market Trends
As a technology provider that has sold storage for surveillance re- cording for many years, here are some of the trends we’ve observed:
Camera counts and resolutions increasing. As camera prices con- tinue to drop, the number of cameras being deployed has multi- plied, and the resolution of the cameras has increased. HD-capable
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1080p 25/30 fps cameras are the new baseline for what is expected from any new cameras. This enables better and more granular sur- veillance – and significantly increases the volume of data to be stored and managed.
Adoption of analytics. Security departments are analyzing the surveillance data they collect using object recognition, license plate recognition (LPR) and other “AI” techniques. These analytical ca- pabilities enable more sophisticated approaches to security manage- ment, provided the security department has the means to quickly and easily access the data they have at their disposal. For example, some retailers are now analyzing surveillance footage to study shopper be- havior – did they pause at any particular kiosk? What was their facial expression or reaction when looking at a sign?
Airports are analyzing footage to study security lines throughout the day as stadiums look at attendee traffic patterns to determine the
SECURE STORAGE
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