Why surveillance will reach a wider consumer audience in 2018

In 2017 we foresaw the emergence of video surveillance as a service. We also predicted an increase in intelligence in cameras, greater adoption of analytics, and more content aggregation. We saw biometrics taking increasing importance as a measure to prevent massive data breaches.

We took on more projects that were larger in scope and size. More implementations involved higher-resolution cameras and longer retention times leading to greater adoption of multi-tier storage.

Looking ahead to 2018

Surveillance-as-a-service takes off: In 2017 customers “dipped their toes in the water” with surveillance-as-a-service, and in 2018 it should gain acceptance with a wider audience. Increase in analytics: In 2017 neural networks, machine-learning, real-time analytics, and artificial intelligence all got significant airplay, and are turning into real offerings for 2018.Retention times aren’t shrinking, and tape is increasingly viewed as a vital element in surveillance storage architectures

More data will be created and retained longer: Retention times aren’t shrinking, and tape is increasingly viewed as a vital element in surveillance storage architectures. With more data being produced that is vulnerable to cyber-attack, people are also recognising the advantage of the air-gapped protection against ransomware that is inherent with tape.

LTO-8 tape technology lowers the barrier to multi-tiered storage: LTO-8 doubles tape cartridge capacity from the previous generation, enabling customers to store up to 30TB per cartridge for more cost-effective, long-term data retention. We will leverage these enhancements to deliver multi-tier solutions for persistent data growth and protection challenges in video surveillance, to offer cost-effective tiering for as little as half-a-petabyte of data.

What multi-tier storage offers

The multi-tier storage architecture as an enabling technology for video surveillance is clearly seeing traction going into the new year. There are market challenges – both political and technical – but the trend is one of progress. The market is in a state of flux, and additional stakeholders want to use surveillance data, so educating the market on how to use these architectures to resolve these problems is increasingly important.