Extending the Value of Physical Security Systems
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WHITE PAPER EXTENDING THE VALUE OF PHYSICAL SECURITY SYSTEMS WITH ENHANCED VIDEO SURVEILLANCE Utilizing surveillance cameras with video analytics can have a major impact on business objectives. ENHANCED VIDEO SURVEILLANCE CDW.com | 800.800.4239 2 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Organizations across industries have relied on video distributed throughout their facilities have tremendous surveillance systems as an important component of their untapped potential as sensors in the Internet of Things. physical security environment for decades. The advent of Surveillance system deployments enable organizations to inexpensive, network-enabled cameras facilitated the move beyond simple forensic investigations and use their growth of these systems to the point where virtually cameras proactively to protect people, property and every organization has some video surveillance footprint. processes. Whether limited to critical areas or deployed throughout an This white paper looks beyond traditional deployments enterprise, these cameras collect video footage that of video surveillance and identifies ways that video systems organizations historically used for forensic purposes — can deliver value beyond typical security use cases. It something went wrong, and video footage enabled addresses the challenges to implementing these technologies security teams to look back to determine what happened. and provides advice on overcoming those challenges Video surveillance is undergoing an important evolution. through examples from key industries, including retail, Organizations realize that the cameras they have education, healthcare and energy and utilities. Physical Security Solutions Costs quickly mounted as organizations hired additional staff Every organization relies on people, property and processes or outsourced this function to security guard services. Firms to achieve its mission. From a hospital treating patients that chose to make this significant investment found that the with expensive medical equipment to a retail store offering reliance on human analysts meant high rates of errors and merchandise to customers, protecting those assets is a crucial overlooked events. component of managing risk and protecting the bottom line. The next generation of video surveillance technology Failure to provide adequate protection increases risk and incorporates video analytics to reduce this reliance on human jeopardizes the organization’s ability to achieve its strategic intervention, automating the analysis of captured video footage. and operational objectives. Enhanced video surveillance (EVS) systems augment existing Physical security solutions provide the baseline level of surveillance camera deployments with sophisticated video control necessary to address these risks, but they also have analytics tools to enable organizations to move beyond reactive tremendous untapped potential to deliver additional business security use cases and leverage their video as a valuable data value. Organizations now have the opportunity to create this source for business. additional value, improving the return on their physical security Video surveillance technology saw several key developments investments while utilizing their current infrastructure. over the past decade that are enabling video surveillance to become a source of digital data. First and foremost, the Evolution of Video Technology emergence of IP-based cameras allows organizations to Video surveillance systems serve as the enabling technology cost-effectively replace legacy analog cameras that ran over to unlock this additional value. Many organizations originally dedicated coaxial networks with IP-enabled digital cameras installed these systems in years past with the goal of providing a that run over shared wired and wireless Ethernet networks. forensic tool to support physical security investigations or simply Administrators can now place cameras in locations that were as a deterrent. Using these systems for previously difficult to reach due to forensics required time-consuming manual electrical wiring limitations. The use of processes that required investigators to Ethernet cabling with Power over Ethernet spend hours analyzing captured footage, (PoE) offers the ability to hang a camera searching for suspicious events. On top of almost anywhere that a Category 5E or being an entirely reaction-based approach, 66% Category 6 cable can be pulled and use that lengthy forensic investigations could delay single connection for both power and data. the actual response and pursuit of potential Second, the cameras themselves criminal suspects. have gotten smarter. Modern surveillance Humans also quickly became a limiting cameras have computing and storage factor as organizations sought to achieve Percentage of educational capability on board the device, allowing real-time situational awareness through institutions and hospitals that plan them to process video analytics in real their video surveillance systems. Typical to upgrade their video surveillance time at the edge of the network. The term attempts to do this relied on human solutions in the next three years1 camera itself may be a misnomer in certain operators monitoring live video feeds to react cases where it functions as an IoT sensor, and respond to incidents as they occurred. capable of generating more than just video. Source: 1Campus Safety, “2019 Video Surveillance Survey: Campus Cameras More Popular Than Ever,” April 17, 2019 ENHANCED VIDEO SURVEILLANCE CDW.com | 800.800.4239 3 As video surveillance systems have evolved into the keyword searching of video recordings for faster recovery and world of data, they also have moved out of realm of control by discovery of events. For example, an operator can search for all organizations’ facilities departments. Cameras are now IP- instances of cameras seeing a male with a red shirt that occurred enabled endpoints that connect to enterprise networks and on Saturday between the hours of 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. in the parking transmit video and data streams back to servers that process lot, matching the description of a suspect. Then all video clips and record video to storage devices. All of these devices and from all cameras with matching data can be retrieved, allowing systems require cybersecurity controls, and all of this is under the operator to quickly find event recordings of the suspect in the leadership of the CIO. Is it any wonder that organizations, now minutes, as opposed to hours. more than ever, are entrusting their video surveillance systems Insight provides immediate situational awareness that helps to IT departments to design, support and, in some cases, operate? organizations improve their real-time operational capabilities. For example, a school might use its enhanced video surveillance Building the Case for Enhanced platform to assess people entering a secure facility and utilize Video Surveillance facial recognition to compare them to a database of known Enhanced video surveillance platforms combine IP-based video employees, parents and students. If an unknown individual cameras, video analytics technology and artificial intelligence attempts to enter the building amid a stream of known techniques to achieve three key operational security goals: individuals, the EVS system can trigger an alert to security hindsight, insight and foresight. Organizations should view the personnel, who can intercept the unknown person. potential capabilities of their EVS investments through each of Foresight applies the lessons learned from video analytics these three lenses. to optimize future performance. For example, a hospital food Hindsight provides the ability to forensically examine past services team could analyze customer flow patterns in the events. From a security perspective, this is the traditional use of cafeteria to optimize the staffing of different shifts and the a video surveillance system and historically can involve a time- arrangement of employees throughout the cafeteria at different consuming manual process of video review. With video analytics, times of the day. This approach not only optimizes costs but also the EVS system can collect metadata about objects seen on improves patient, staff and visitor satisfaction with the facility. recorded video to create a searchable index. This can allow for The shift to enhanced video surveillance today is strikingly similar to past changes in telephony technology. As phones shifted from analog devices with dedicated infrastructure to IP-enabled devices, delivery of telephone service passed from Where Video Analytics and facilities to IT organizations. The technology teams had to shift Data Analytics Meet their capabilities to implement, manage and maintain those systems. Over time, IT teams learned how to help their users Analytics is everywhere in the modern organization. realize the value of Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony and integrate The rise of advanced analytic techniques and the availability the technology into existing productivity and collaboration of inexpensive storage and compute capacity allow businesses systems to maximize the return on their investments. EVS to harness the value in many different types of data. This systems promise to have this same degree of impact on the field makes it important to draw a distinction between data analytics of video surveillance, allowing IT organizations to exploit the and video analytics. value of video data beyond simply physical security. Data analytics efforts typically seek to analyze the highly