Cloud computing, a maturing IT strategy, now has moved decisively into physical security, including video surveillance, with a surprising litany of business benefits. It turns out, for many, to be an essential tool to meet that equally essential “do more with less” attitude, which continues to spur consolidation, outsourced business processes and an accelerated investment in technologies that shifts costs from large capital expenditures to operational expenses. Depending on how high in the cloud, this can include infrastructure, platforms and applications now delivered in the form of services.
For enterprise security leaders as well as their IT brethren, there are many ways to look at the cloud. It can go by various labels. Hosted service. Software as a service. Platform as a service. Managed video as a service. Infrastructure as a service.