With the proliferation of video
surveillance in organizations both big and small around the globe, there
are also mounting concerns from systems integrators and end-users about
how they are going to manage this influx of data in the months and
years to come.
According to the results of a recent study conducted by Seagate, a
manufacturer of surveillance-optimized hard drives, which surveyed
nearly 1,100 integrators and enterprise IT executives, 74 percent of
respondents said that the number of surveillance cameras being used will
increase over the next 12 months while the same percentage also
reported that the importance of video analytics will also increase over
the same time period. Three-quarters of those surveyed also said they
expect the strategic value of video surveillance will increase.
The “Video Surveillance Trends Report,” which included respondents
from organizations in the manufacturing, banking and financial services,
technology, transportation, and retail sectors within the U.S., UK,
India, China and Brazil, also found that most businesses are already
using more than 200 cameras that are running around-the-clock.
Specifically, respondents reported that a median number of 249 cameras
are being used to collect data at their organizations. That number was
even higher in the U.S. and the UK, where the median number of cameras
in use was 349. In addition, 34 percent of those surveyed said that they
have “significantly increased” their number of surveillance cameras
over the past 12 months.
Craig Carmichael, market research analyst for Seagate, said that
while they did expect to see above average growth for video surveillance
data compared to the growth typically seen in the data storage market,
which is usually somewhere between 20 to 40 percent, they were somewhat
taken aback by the breadth of the demand for video.
“I don’t think
we were surprised about how strong it was, but how consistently strong
it was across verticals and across geographies,” said Carmichael. “The
vertical story was quite interesting too. There are pockets of
verticals, such as government and manufacturing, where we do see very,
very aggressive surveillance growth. But we didn’t see any verticals
where there was that below average or subpar performing vertical, so
they were pretty much strong across the board.”
Aubrey Muhlach, surveillance segment marketing manager for Seagate,
said that people are also discovering how valuable this data can be,
especially when advanced analytics are applied to it.
This could be why a greater number of organizations are retaining
video for longer periods of time than they once did. According to the
study, 27 percent of respondents said that they are keeping video
footage for a year or longer and 23 percent said that they are retaining
it for 90 days to one year. Another 14 percent said that they hold onto
footage for between 60 to 90 days, 23 percent keep it for 30 to 60 days
and only 11 percent save it for less than 30 days.
The desire to store of all this footage for longer periods of time
might not be realized by many organizations, however, if the drives they
are using cannot withstand the inherent burdens that come with handling
video data.
“One of the biggest costs as people are building out their
surveillance system is, in fact, the storage. One thing that we have
found is a lot of people are using the cheapest drives out there to
store their data, which may seem like a nice, upfront investment but
what we’re seeing is an earlier failure rate of those drives,” explained
Muhlach. “They are typically taking desktop-class drives, plugging them
into the systems – those drives aren’t built to work with these massive
numbers of cameras at these high streaming capabilities – and they’re
not built to run all day, every day.”
Given that increasing camera counts will also generate more data,
there were also mounting concerns among respondents about how they are
going to adequately store and maintain this footage. When asked what
their organization’s challenges were with using their existing primary
storage media for storing surveillance footage, 47 percent said
maintenance, while 44 percent said capacity. Other challenges noted by
respondents included: data recovery (44 percent), reliability (40
percent), speed (40 percent, and cost (38 percent).
An
overwhelming majority of respondents, 87 percent, said that video
surveillance is becoming more challenging to manage and 94 percent
reported that they will receive increased infrastructure investment for
it. Also, the study found that most respondents are using traditional
storage solutions (85 percent), as well as some form of the cloud (83
percent) to store video.
“We continue to see these higher resolution cameras and I think a lot
that is to meet the requirements of whatever application or environment
that you’re in and, obviously, these cameras only create an even better
storage story,” explained Muhlach. “Where people are storing data also
seems to be evolving a little bit as well.”
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