Storage Tip: Expect digital video to expand its data security role

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What seems to be the problem? Quietly, video surveillance is starting to become big business for enterprises and not just for banks, casinos, protective security organizations, and retail stores. Surveillance is taking a new technology tack from analog to digital. And that transition is not just in the storing of surveillance data -- from videotape to hard disk, but also to a transition of responsibility for video to IT organizations from whatever current department has responsibility. IT was not likely to have responsibility for videotape, but it is increasingly likely to have responsibility for data stored on hard disks. That has to do not so much with the media, but rather because of the management processes that IT is already familiar with.

As a storage professional, you probably find yourself in one of three positions: 1) already responsible for digital video and having to deal with more of it, 2) just taking over the responsibility for digital video and wondering how to handle it, or 3) trying to figure out what you will have to do if your company shifts to digital video and you find yourself on the threshold of accepting some new responsibilities and new technologies for managing and storing data.

What do you need to know? Several factors are driving the shift from video to digital surveillance (some of the same principles apply to the same transition in cameras). The use of analog video tape for surveillance has a number of problems including lack of high-resolution video images, capacity limitations that may make it impossible to keep videos as long as an organization would like, and problems in finding the right piece of media and then searching it. Digital is easier to manage than videotape both from a search perspective (random search vs. sequential search) as well as a pure handling perspective (fixed disk is easier to manage than having to change videotapes).

Historically, video surveillance has been done for video security; think ATM cameras. The traditional information used is forensic in nature and done after the fact, such as facial recognition and license plate recognition. That means that an attempt is made to detect a perpetrator of a crime after a crime has been committed. (Hopefully, the knowledge that surveillance is taking place can serve to prevent a crime from being committed in the first place.)

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