The security industry is going increasingly digital these days, with more small- and medium-sized businesses joining their global brethren by moving their data to the cloud, leveraging the benefits of artificial intelligence, and embracing more open solutions.
Innovation is expected to continue at a rapid pace, thanks in part to the residual effects of the pandemic which has driven changes that might have otherwise taken five years or a decade or more to get into customers’ hands on a global scale. Analytics is about expedience, and in the surveillance world, it makes it possible to identify and search for the “who did it?” clip you need.
Analytics also provides more actionable intelligence than a simple surveillance camera may provide, from identifying high-traffic areas during select times of the day and alerting staff to pay greater attention to these areas, to business intelligence that can enable a company to staff a store with more employees. For analytics, along with the cloud, it comes back to the core themes of being able to do more with technology and relying less on humans.
The cloud story is very related: it provides the ability to perform video-related tasks from anywhere on any device. In addition, the cloud makes it easier to share videos with other stakeholders and collaborate on investigations.
By storing video on the cloud, end users reduce their total cost of ownership because they no longer have to invest in onsite storage solutions, while gaining greater storage capabilities and thereby future-proofing their solutions.
Another interesting trend that we’ll be hearing more about this year is the overall deployment patterns of video surveillance systems. This is part of the cloud trend, but the broader trend is the amount of effort it takes to deploy, monitor and maintain the video surveillance system.
Because the cloud requires less total cost of ownership and cloud access can be intuitive, it is driving interest for solutions that can be hosted in the cloud. Related to the debate of open vs. closed solutions is how much the surveillance market prefers a turnkey solution compared to a more custom best-of-breed and tailored solution. Smaller and mid-market companies will be more interested in the turnkey solutions provided by a single vendor, while enterprise-level companies traditionally gravitate toward investing in customised solutions that are more likely to address their unique security challenges.
One other related trend to keep an eye on is the role of the integrator as part of the rise of cloud and Video Surveillance as a Service (VSaaS) offerings.
