IMS Research forecasts that private cloud being used for the infrastructure of enterprise video surveillance systems will become a major trend over the coming years. Private cloud offers the same advantages as public cloud, which includes: remote access to data providing there is an internet connection, and shared use of data processing and storage resources.
IMS Research forecasts that private cloud being used for the infrastructure of enterprise video surveillance systems will become a major trend over the coming years. Private cloud offers the same advantages as public cloud, which includes: remote access to data providing there is an internet connection, and shared use of data processing and storage resources. The difference between public and private cloud is that access to a private cloud is restricted by a firewall. Theoretically, private cloud systems are more secure than public cloud, although in practice no network is completely secure.
The use of cloud computing as infrastructure for a video surveillance system is not a new concept. Video surveillance service providers have used aspects of cloud computing in their solutions for more than ten years. However, the prevalence of enterprise video surveillance systems using private cloud is starting to gain some traction.
Growth in private cloud used as infrastructure for video surveillance is being driven, in part, by IT managers increasingly taking responsibility for the management of video surveillance systems. This has opened the door to technology in the IT industry being used for video surveillance applications.
An example of private cloud used as infrastructure for a video surveillance system is Microsoft's Global Security Operations Centre (GSOC). GSOC comprises of three monitoring stations situated in the U.K., US, and India, which monitor the alarms and video for more than 700 Microsoft sites worldwide. The meshed network of servers (private cloud network) that connects these Microsoft sites together is what enables this consolidation of more than 700 distributed sites.
The operational advantages of using a private cloud infrastructure for video surveillance is the ability to consolidate video surveillance data from remote sites into a source that can be accessed from any geographic location providing there is internet access. This means that the internal staffing resource that is used to monitor video surveillance systems can be centralised rather than dispersed, which typically results in a saving in terms of personnel costs. Some of the hardware requirements, such as onsite storage, may also be reduced as data can be stored onto the private cloud rather than at separate locations. Furthermore, by using centralised monitoring stations to monitor the video surveillance systems of an entire company, standards and common practices are more likely to be followed by monitoring operators; this forms the basis of proprietary remote monitoring.
The effects of large companies increasingly opting to use proprietary remote monitoring based on a private cloud network are likely to mainly impact the remote monitoring services market. With a loss of large commercial customers, remote monitoring service providers will have to focus on the residential and SMB market. Hardware vendors supplying storage systems specifically for video surveillance may also see a change in demand, from smaller multiple terabyte (TB) units, to appliances with capacity in the hundreds or thousands of petabytes (PB). Furthermore, as all of the video surveillance data will be hosted into a unified, virtualised storage system, the ability to mine this data for useful information, such as marketing information, becomes more achievable.