IHS report examines growth of body-worn video surveillance market

IHS expects third party storage of data from body-worn cameras to become the majority portion of this market

The world market for body-worn video surveillance within law enforcement is growing. In 2014 IHS estimated the total world market for body-worn video surveillance equipment and service in law enforcement was worth $60 million. However, interestingly the service portion of the market will grow to become a larger proportion than the hardware market by 2019; this is according to recently published forecasts from IHS Inc.

Third party storage

An officer’s camera typical records between 1-2 hours per day. IHS estimates that this result in 2-3 GB of data being collected by each officer per shift. All of this data needs to be stored and managed.

There are two main methods for storage and data management; local (on-site storage on a physical server owned, controlled and maintained by the specific police force), or third party (off-site “cloud” storage and management through an external datacentre such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure).

“Third party storage will become more commonly used over the next five years to store body-worn video surveillance. This is because it is more economical and scalable with the expected growth of data storage requirements.”

There have been security concerns raised over the storage of evidence and personal data on non-police servers, however third party solutions are considered to offer the best security. Third party datacentres store data in farmed server arrays, fragmented and spread across several servers. Whilst with local storage, data is generally stored in rack servers, where complete data sets are all in one place. Both local and third parties encrypt data, however, third party solutions are considered to offer better penetration resilience.

Storage and management of data

Whilst IHS expects third party storage of data from body-worn cameras to become the majority portion of this market, and that overall third party storage offers the most future proof, scalable, and flexible option, IHS does not believe that third party is best for every police force, and in many situations local storage will offer the best solution. Data storage and management needs to be altered to police forces specific needs.

The storage and management of data is becoming an increasingly more important part of police forces video surveillance ability. With increasing retention requirements and increasing surveillance video data, evaluating storage and management as an integral part of a surveillance system allows an effective balance between performance, maximum retention and potential return on investment.