12 Cost-Efficient Surveillance

There are plenty of books, webinars and conferences on cost-effectiveness analysis.But the simplest is producing good results without costing a lot of money, which is also an important mission of enterprise security executives.

Here are 12 strategies when it comes to security video and IP surveillance. This article will be presented in 2 parts. Part I is as follows:

Today, a majority of purchasing decisions related to enterprise security video involve the internal IT department for infrastructure sharing, cybersecurity, certification and maintenance needs. Just a few years ago, and for some through to today, physical security professionals looked at IT participation with a jaundiced eye. No more.

IT owns, operates and maintains most enterprise communication networks. With the growth of IP security video, network cameras, Power over Internet (PoE) and the Internet of Things (IoT), to name a few trends, IT has firmly established itself as a security partner. And, on the positive side, it’s a partner often with a vastly larger budget, profile and mission to help within the enterprise. Technology is pretty sophisticated today and getting even more complex and interconnected.

More recently when it comes to cost-effective video, security professionals now partner with their internal colleagues beyond IT, often to share the technology but also to sometimes gain from the partners’ budgets.

Such cost-sharing partnerships are happening or can happen elsewhere. Security video is being used for business process and environmental monitoring as well as staff training and regulatory auditing purposes at sites ranging from utilities, healthcare facilities and industrial plants to financial institutions and fast food operations.

Through an on-site security command center, through a dealer or integrator or through a third-party central monitoring station, cloud-based services can provide forensics storage and retrieval, remote video verification, virtual guards, surveillance services and even business process and environmental services unrelated to security.

The cloud is also a significant trend of IT operations.

Cloud computing can be today’s solution for everything from email, office applications and big data to video surveillance. In a nutshell, in the cloud applications are the use of resources (hardware and/or software) delivered as a service over a network, typically the Internet, but the cloud can be internal and private, too.

Enterprise security executives may not have to know exactly everything that is going on in the cloud, just that their needs are being met. It’s rental, not buying. So there can be some cost savings, or at least cost distribution, when it comes to such services as:

What also drives this application is the growing use of mobile access, display and control anywhere through laptops, smartphones and tablets, especially for security video and clips of alarms and incidents.

Look for locations and sensitivities where placement of technology with longer range or covering more of the scene can cut down on total number of IP cameras. And this strategy is a good way to migrate cost effectively to newer IP technology.

In addition, some panoramic units offer full 180-degree or 360-degree overviews of a particular area with megapixel sensor resolution at 30 frames per second combined with a fish-eye lens. There is a zoom-in capability with close-up images transmitted in separate streams so that both overview and detail can be viewed or reviewed at the same time. Built-in (edge) dewarping eliminates image distortion caused by the fish-eye lens.

Lower resolution of analog and VGA cameras is more forgiving when it comes to lens selection. But using an inferior lens with a megapixel or HD camera can undermine camera and overall system performance. When high-definition and IP megapixel cameras first began to emerge on the market, there was a lag in the lenses for them. But the gap has closed. So it makes cost sense to match quality of the lens with the higher level resolution of the IP cameras.

There are different types of standard copper cabling including coax, UTP, twisted pair and copper-line Ethernet. More typically in networks, there is CAT5 and CAT6 cabling. There are fiber optics approaches as well as numerous wireless ones including microware, wireless mesh, cellular and Wi-Fi, as examples.

Picking the right method per a location, infrastructure or application can positively impact the installation cost in addition to the total cost of ownership.

Concerning wireless, the City of Compton, California, has taken a unique route with millimeter wave transceivers. As security networks grow in size and complexity, dealing with increasing amounts of data and interference is becoming a challenge; and this is where millimeter wave wireless links shine .It’s cost effective for what it delivers. Recent millimeter advances have sliced the technology by 90 percent and more; devices have shrunk in size while performance increased significantly.

Millimeter-wave plays off the recent trend of compact base stations, known as small cells, to expand data capacity.

Video signals demand the greatest bandwidth and, accordingly, a higher data rate. Speeds of many gigabits per second are needed to transmit 1080p high-definition video. That data rate can be reduced if video compression techniques are used prior to transmission but sometimes at the expense of the video quality or in other negative ways.

There are numerous storage methods and devices from hard to virtual to cloud. Especially as security video turns into big data and video systems more closely integrate with a diversity of security and business systems, storage standards are important and falling into place. Following such standards is smart and will prove cost effective in the long run. Just a year ago, for instance, industry standards organization ONVIF released Profile G, the specification that encompasses on-board video storage, searching, retrieval capabilities and media playback.

Profile G was created to further refine the interoperability between live video and video storage. It covers IP cameras, encoders and network video recorder (NVR) devices as well as client systems such as video management systems, building management systems and physical security information management (PSIM) systems, among others. Profile G had been in release-candidate status for the past six months to provide review within the industry.

ONVIF introduced the profile concept to enable end users to more easily identify features supported by a profile without determining the compatibility between versions of the ONVIF specifications. Already in existence are Profile S for video and audio streaming and Profile C, which allows interoperability between clients and devices of physical access control systems and network-based video systems.

Network video recorders (NVRs) are at the center of today’s IP video systems. One advance – storage area network (SAN) technology – is dropping in cost and increasing in features. An example is new higher level enterprise SANs.

In this article we have covered Part I, 12 Cost-Efficient Video Surveillance Strategies (Part II) will be our next article.