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.)

However, surveillance can be done for other purposes as well. For example, in helping a retail store clear its name in the case of a fraudulently placed accident lawsuit. Surveillance information can be used to show that an accident did not occur as alleged. But since a lawsuit may not be filed until sometime after the purported event (say a year), that means that the store has to retain a lot of information. Good for storage vendors, but a burden for IT.

The use of analytics in conjunction with digital video can also enable the use of digital video for a variety of new tasks. To do this digital video data must provide mainstream IT information that can help better manage a company by combining video with analytics to actually trigger events to make video more proactive. That requires an architecture for integrated situation awareness. For example, the paths of large objects (such as cars in a parking lot or people in a store) can be tracked. Long term monitoring produces event statistics, such as the arrival and departure distribution of people over time into a store. A retail store might use that information to help plan its staffing requirements by day and time. Moreover, customer behavior tracking may be able to create more marketing leverage, such as the ability to determine how to more effectively shelve products in a store to increase the likelihood of purchase.

Just think of the possibilities! For example, a food store (as well as its suppliers) would be very interested in knowing those traffic and purchase patterns over time in order to not only determine the best placement of items but also the placement of items that might be purchased together in a particular store visit by a customer.

Vendors also claim that moving to digital video is probably more cost effective than proprietary analog video tape solutions that are not integrated in any way as an enterprise information asset using IT's standard infrastructure.

What about the "big brother is watching you" issue? Enterprises are private -- not governmental -- organizations and are operating on their private property. Visitors can choose to visit or not.

So video surveillance is only going to become bigger and the transition will be from videotape to digital.

What can you do about it? Digital video will not only continue (and expand) its data security role, but also move further into mainstream IT (with the aid of analytic tools) to help the business better sell and market its products.

So should you resist or embrace. Resistance is futile. Historically, IT has been given additional challenges, such as e-mail after growing up initially with transaction processing systems. Embrace the technology. In the digital era, digital -- not analog -- is the way to go. View it as a good idea to be proactive about taking on additional responsibility. After all, it can provide a little more spice in your life, but more importantly you can view it as a job growth opportunity. Take advantage of it.