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Video surveillance industry poised to reach full potential

The video surveillance industry is an exciting, fast-growing market which has yet to realise its full potential, especially with the advent of the Big Data era.

The market for video surveillance equipment is expected to reach $19.4 billion in 2016, and this revenue is primarily made up of cameras, video management software, digital video recorders, network video recorders and storage. Overall industry growth is predicted to grow more than 12% per year for at least the next few years.

Fredy Issa, business development manager: Digital Security Industry for EMC Gulf.

Fredy Issa, business development manager: Digital Security Industry for EMC Gulf, says this growth is largely being driven by increased security concerns to combat terrorism and crimes, a market transition from analogue technology to digital infrastructure, and improvement in video content analytics. “These developments are opening the door to new applications for video surveillance,” Issa says. “The final factor driving growth in the video surveillance industry is the high growth of surveillance investments in certain emerging countries, including South Africa.”

Storage is a significant and important component of a video surveillance solution, and represents an increasing proportion of the segment’s investment. This is mainly due to a number of industry trends, including: higher resolution cameras; the growing number of camera feeds; the growth in networked video surveillance data; virtualised server configurations; ease of deployment; and the private cloud.

“Organisations which invest heavily in CCTV and surveillance solutions should not skimp on the storage component. There is a trend for some companies to invest millions of rands in CCTV equipment and surveillance solutions to minimise their security risk – but to opt for the best cameras and cheap storage,” Issa says. “As a result, the storage is unreliable, which means that critical images cannot always be retrieved when they are needed.”

He believes the focus should be on a reliable storage system, even if it means saving costs on the cameras.

“The emergence of large-scale video surveillance deployments has created a number of challenges, including the creation of a massive amount of content that must be stored, analysed, and managed by security teams with limited resources,” he says. “Organisations are storing multiple petabytes of data, so a reliable storage solution is of paramount importance.”

Systems which use IP (Internet Protocol) technology are easy to use and provide quick, simple access to decision-makers. Furthermore, the images can be viewed from any device connected to the network, and it is possible to restrict access to the appropriate people.

“These video surveillance solutions provide powerful, scale-out storage and are simple to install, manage and scale to virtually any size, regardless of how the customer’s surveillance needs change in the future,” Issa says.

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