VSaaS market is expected to reach US$2,390.9 million by 2017, growing at a CAGR of 31.5 percent from 2012 to 2017. The global access control as a service market, on the other hand, is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 24 percent from 2016 to 2020.
The security industry is continuously evolving, as new technologies and business strategies exert their influence on the market. Every now and then we come across new developments that would change the course of demand. To some, this change and its pace would seem overwhelming, but it is a reality that industry players have to cope with.
A recent such development, for instance, has been the move from traditional security systems to cloud-based surveillance and access control systems. Often known by terms like video surveillance as a service (VSaaS) or access control as a service (ACaaS), these are beginning to become quite popular among a number of users.
According to MarketsandMarkets, VSaaS market is expected to reach US$2,390.9 million by 2017, growing at a CAGR of 31.5 percent from 2012 to 2017. The global access control as a service market, on the other hand, is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 24 percent from 2016 to 2020. Some reports suggest IHS expects the latter market to exceed $530 million by 2018 and $1.8 billion by 2025.
Assisting such rapid growth of this segment are factors such as improved bandwidth availability and cost-efficiency. But while these are rather obvious reasons, what is more interesting from an industry and market perspective is the development of the technology itself. Security as a service is no longer just about cloud-based video surveillance or access control, but is increasingly about analytics and more specific solutions.
What is on the Offer?
For this article, we interviewed a few major companies that provide analytics as a service. Most of them have just introduced their offerings to the market and hence do not have many cases to talk about, but, given the nature of the market and its direction, see strong potential for growth.
What is significant about these companies is that they are willing to focus on certain specific features to penetrate the market. Density, a Silicon Valley startup, for instance, offers people counting as a service.
Speaking to a&s on its various features, Andrew Farah, CEO of Density, explained what the company offers.
“Our people-counting sensors use computer vision, depth sensing technology, and a powerful onboard processor to measure how many people are inside a space at any given time,” Farah said. “Customers can easily mount our units across a set of doorways, connect to power and WiFi, and use our API to access how many people have visited. Density’s system integrates this occupancy data with customers’ pre-existing software to inform business decisions. The simple question, ‘How busy is this room?’ has profound implications for space utilization, staffing, and security.”
Another company that is offering similar service is KAI Square. Kapil Pendse, Product Manager at KAI Square, explained that their solution consists of a video management platform and a number of video analytics built on top of it.
“Videos from IP cameras are recorded and analyzed at the same time, to provide real-time analytics & notifications to users,” Pendse said. “Users can access their data and manage all their cameras from a single account on our KAI Unified Platform cloud.”
Other aspects of analytics are also being taken to the cloud. Allevate, a UK-based company, is offering facial recognition as a hosted cloud service. The company, on its website, says that its product enables organizations, large or small, to utilize facial recognition as a hosted cloud service, with minimal capital outlay. The solution incorporates advanced face recognition technology without the need to install or maintain a complicated software infrastructure or related computer platform on the customer’s premises.
“What we have done is we have taken a platform which is already tried and tested and used on a large scale by US security organizations and we have enabled it to run on the cloud,” said Carl Gohringer, Founder and Director of Allevate. “So we can deploy it in Amazon web services or any cloud infrastructure and run it on behalf of the customer. So now, rather than the organization deploying face recognition on the premises, and making a significant expenditure and having to run and maintain complicated hardware, they can simply access our service in the cloud. And we can do it it if they have existing cameras or we would work to install cameras for face recognition purposes and they just direct those cameras to our cloud service where all of the faces detected by the video stream are sent into the cloud for matching against watch lists, and the alerts are simply sent back to the customer.”
Solution to Bandwidth Concerns
Allevate does this with a system of its own that helps manage any bandwidth-related challenges that the customer might have. Gohringer said that rather than sending the entire video feed from the cameras to the cloud infrastructure, which could be bandwidth intensive, the company actually has a small device that can be placed next to the camera, which does face detection and cropping locally. “Then all we do is we send the cropped faced into the cloud, for matching against watch lists. So there are no bandwidth issues,” he explained.
Agent Video Intelligence (Agent Vi), had also recently announced a cloud-based analytics software as a service. The product initially includes a variety of real-time video analytics applications designed to analyze video captured by surveillance cameras and automatically detect and alert for security breaches.
“Our solution is based on having a device at the edge,” said Zvika Ashani, CTO of Agent Vi. “So the device can be an IP camera that is compatible with our cloud service or it can be an appliance which is basically a miniature PC that can connect to video streams on the local network. This enables us to process any IP camera. The camera or the device on the local network uses the standard HTTPS communication protocol to connect to the cloud service, so in most cases, it does not require any special configuration to the firewall or the local network. If the local network is open to outgoing HTTPS connection, then it will simply work without requiring IT to do any configuration locally.”
Agent Vi has a facility wherein the whole video need not be uploaded on to the cloud for analysis. There is some processing done at the edge, either in the camera or in an appliance that the company provides. A few key features are extracted from the video at this stage and only these are sent to the cloud.
“So we are talking about the volume of data that we need to send to the cloud is on average is going to be less than 50 kbps, and in some cases lower than 10 kbps,” Ashani said. “This means that you can easily have multiple cameras being analyzed on a fairly low bandwidth connection.”
“So we are talking about the volume of data that we need to send to the cloud is on average is going to be less than 50 kbps, and in some cases lower than 10 kbps,” Ashani said. “This means that you can easily have multiple cameras being analyzed on a fairly low bandwidth connection.”