Network / IP security - Security beat

A busy first day at the ASIS International Seminar and Exhibits in Atlanta ended with a surprise strategic announcement by one of the industry’s largest suppliers and one of its most successful up-and-comers. Axis Communications and Sightlogix announced a strategic agreement to sell both technologies cooperatively to end-user customers through dealer channels. Despite the broad product range Axis brings to market, the company does not have a perimeter security solution, which is the stren...

Commoditisation is the biggest problem facing today’s security integrators, says Bill Bozeman, president and CEO of PSA Security Network, an electronic security cooperative encompassing some 250 electronic security systems integrators, and aligning them with over 150 vendor partners. Multi-million-dollar manufacturers are taking advantage of economies of scale to drive down pricing of many of the components our industry uses, and lower prices are poised to have a long-term detrimental imp...

Just days before the ASIS International conference and exhibits in Atlanta, the global security market's attention last week has been focused on the big Security Essen 2014 trade show in Germany. With more floor space, exhibitors and attendees than ASIS, Security Essen highlights a wealth of technology resources to an eager international audience every two years. Several SourceSecurity.com staff members attended Security Essen last week, and my colleagues reported that the well-attended show ref...

I love Wikipedia, not just because I use it every day, but also because it reflects the value that can be created when a large community works together. When each member of a community contributes a small part, the result is monumental. I saw an estimate somewhere that it would take a million pages to print out Wikipedia. Is there an opportunity to leverage video in the same way; that is, to tie together the capabilities of millions to create a central repository that could be useful? Consider...

The Silver Comet Trail is a 61-mile hiking and biking trail west of Atlanta that follows a route previously travelled by the Silver Comet passenger train from 1947 to 1969. I heard about the train when I was growing up but was never a passenger. As an adult, I have been on the Silver Comet Trail a couple of times; it’s mostly level and great for biking (or walking). The former route of the railroad tracks has been paved over, extending through a beautiful, natural environment that feels li...

Abraham Maslow's "law of the instrument" says: If the tool you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. To avoid the pitfall Maslow describes, let’s remember that the nature of a threat profile should decide the choice of security equipment, not the availability of that equipment. When we hear about a school shooting, for example, some of us immediately think “they should have had a camera system?” The ones thinking that probably sell camera systems. Although we...

If a video surveillance system is installed using public funds, should the resulting video therefore be accessible to the public? A poll in the United Kingdom suggests the majority of Britons think it should. 64 percent of 1,345 people surveyed believe that British taxpayers, who pay for cameras placed in public places, should have access to the video feeds through live web streaming. The survey was conducted by installer CCTV.co.uk. There could be advantages to providing public access to vide...

Highlighting China’s Video Surveillance Giants, this is the third in a series of articles on the growing international presence of China’s top three video surveillance/CCTV companies. See the other articles on Hikvsion and Dahua. Zheijiang Uniview Technologies Co., headquartered in Hangzhou, has 29 offices all over China and holds a third-place market share in the Chinese domestic market. In the security market since 2005, the company has roots in IT and telecom and has been an ind...

Highlighting China’s Video Surveillance Giants, this is the second in a series of articles on the growing international presence of China’s top three video surveillance/CCTV companies. Check out articles on Hikvision and Uniview, which are also part of the series. Dahua Technology Co., Ltd. is a Chinese video company with roughly 75 percent of its revenue coming from the huge domestic Chinese market. The rest reflects Dahua’s growing international presence in the video survei...

Highlighting China’s Video Surveillance Giants, this is the first in a series of articles on the growing international presence of China’s top three video surveillance/CCTV companies. See other articles in the series from Dahua and Uniview here and here. For three years now, Hikvision Digital Technology Co. has been ranked as the world’s largest CCTV and video surveillance equipment provider. IHS Research estimates the Chinese manufacturing giant’s global market share in...

Conventional wisdom has been that analogue video has remained popular at the lower end of the security market because of the complexity of installing IP systems. The proliferation of NVR appliances, self-configuring systems and end-to-end solutions today addresses the requirements of even small systems and has overcome issues of complexity. The new systems are plug-and-play and require little expertise on the part of the installer. Ease of installation was among last obstacles to total IP adopti...

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” So said Herbert A. Simon, American Political Scientist, Economist, Sociologist, Psychologist, and Professor. I heard that quote at the Avigilon presentation at IFSEC, repeated by Ian Povey, Avigilon’s director of product marketing and product management. He used the quote to support the need for more (accurate) video analytics. In other words, without analytics, there is so much video information that the operator&rsquo...

Camera manufacturers are coming up with new ways to use the intelligence inside today’s IP cameras. We all know that cameras now have chips inside, and Moore’s Law (look it up) tells us that processing power increases every two years, which means today’s cameras should be (and indeed are) much smarter than the IP cameras of several years ago. Some of that intelligence is being used to accommodate higher resolutions in many of today’s cameras, and it is making possible mo...

The next generation of access control standards will be developed by the recently announced collaboration between the Open Network Video Interface Forum (ONVIF) and the Security Industry Association (SIA), the American trade association headquartered in Silver Spring, Md., near Washington, D.C. Both organisations have staked a claim in the area of access control standards, and now they’re seeing their interests converge. SIA’s Open Supervised Device Protocol (OSDP) standard addresse...

The third day of a trade show is when you start feeling like Bill Murray in that movie "Ground Hog Day." It's like you're living the same day over and over -- the same waiter at breakfast, the same (or at least interchangeable) crowds on the London Underground, the same frowning man waiting to scan your badge, the same frantic search to find your badge among multiple pockets (coinciding with the same brief moment of panic). Another day, another group of suppliers to visit, and some of the theme...

I am visiting IFSEC for the first time in several years, and one revelation is how well the event reflects the increasingly global - and diverse - nature of the security market. On the second day of the show, I was struck by the diversity of attendees, apparent in the many languages you hear spoken in the exhibit hall. I also kept coming upon confirmation of the variety of global security companies from around the world who are exhibiting at the event -- another reflection of a thriving worldwid...

It took a crowded ride during rush hour on the London “Tube” to get me there, including multiple transfers, but the first day of IFSEC at its new venue, the ExCel in London, yielded a couple of newsy announcements and busy traffic at many of the stands. The industry is still reeling from bombshell news last week of the acquisition of Milestone by Canon. The ink may be barely dry, but the agreement was celebrated at IFSEC with a press event and big photo opportunity involving Rokus v...

Frank De Fina put Samsung on the map related to video surveillance in the United States market. Five years ago, before the longtime Panasonic executive signed on, the Samsung brand had little traction in the U.S. surveillance market, although the Korean giant was already well known in the broader electronics market. Back then Samsung surveillance cameras were thought of as inferior to Panasonic, Sony or the other brands – if they were thought of at all. Five years later, Samsung is climbi...

My last few airplane trips have included a fun surprise at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) security screening line – I was invited to enter the TSA Pre-Check line, where you get to keep your shoes on and your laptop in your bag, among other benefits. It’s also a shorter line that goes faster. I had heard about the Pre-Check line from my neighbour, who described his complex process of applying for the perk. What I have since deduced is that the TSA has also been allo...

“Our mission should be to avoid the unmanageable and manage the unavoidable.” I heard that sentence in a completely different context recently, but it seems to summarise well the mission of the security market. If a security professional can avoid the unmanageable, (by logic) he or she can manage whatever else happens (the rest). Avoiding the unmanageable involves using whatever deterrents or preventive measures (including various technologies) to keep things from happening that ca...

We don’t usually write about cybersecurity on this site, but it’s obviously part of the bigger picture. Always looking to learn more, last week I logged onto the GovDefenders Cybersecurity Virtual Event, sponsored by DLT Solutions, a technology reseller to the public sector. There were several interesting “sessions” during the day – I managed to “tune in” a couple of times off and on. Listening to one session in particular reminded me of how much the ph...

Could drones be used for civilian/commercial surveillance within five years? Drone strikes in war zones are reported routinely now in the news, but unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones are still not common in commercial and civilian applications. Commercial uses may still be several years away, but is it too soon to start thinking about the possible security applications? Currently in the United States, Congress has directed the Federal Aviation Administration to come up with a plan by Se...

ADT is looking to "bring the voice of the customer" into the continuing development and expansion of Z-Wave, the radio frequency (RF) communication and product-level interoperability technology that enables wireless networking of battery-powered devices in the home. ADT is the newest Principal Member of the Z-Wave Alliance consortium. Z-Wave is one of the enabling technologies of ADT’s Pulse security and home automation system, which enables a home's electronics to communicate with each o...

Every security system has a storyOur industry’s technology solutions are at work almost everywhere, if you think about it. You might see Kelvin Hughes high-resolution radar pictures providing protection for Maryland’s oyster beds. At the 2014 Oscars, Axis pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras kept watch around the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. At The Marque, an exclusive membership club in Houston, Texas, MorphoTrak 3D facial recognition technology secures access and enables the club to be &ld...

Privacy or Security? Privacy: Does it really exist? Does it matter? You still hear about privacy concerns in our market, but in many ways the privacy ship has sailed. A session on privacy at ISC West reminded me how much privacy expectations have changed in the era of Facebook. Now people think nothing of posting personal information in a public forum that clearly identifies who they are. What a shift from the days when anonymous screen names both protected identities and encouraged greater can...

From being a buzzword today, Big Data is poised to have a large impact on the physical security market with numerous practical applications in preventing and fighting crime. I’ve been hearing a lot about "Big Data" and its impact on the physical security market. Wikipedia tells us that Big Data involves using larger and larger sets of data points to find correlations that can “spot business trends, determine quality of research, prevent diseases, link legal citations, combat crime,...

After days of back-to-back meetings at ISC West, you start hearing some repetitive themes, but then something will surprise you. That happened to me at the NVT booth when I saw a display showing transmission of power and IP video signals over barbed wire (rather than the more familiar Cat-5 or coax cabling). Wondering about possible applications at correctional facilities (or cow pastures), I was assured the display was intended to make the point that NVT products can transmit video and power ov...

Data overload describes both my condition in the midst of a busy trade show and the current condition of the industry itself. At an opening session at ISC West in Las Vegas, I hear that technology development now means there are more sensors and cameras providing more and better quality data all the time. As if making the case, Axis introduced a 4K “super high resolution” camera for under $1,000. Other companies also introduced 4K cameras, including Sony, Bosch, and several more. Ho...