Security personnel are increasingly interested in moving traditional analog surveillance video systems onto corporate networks. By extending access to live and recorded video surveillance throughout the organization by authorized personnel, they can enhance the safety of employees and guests as well as the security of the organization’s assets.
In addition, by transforming surveillance from a system to a networked application, security operations can focus on safety and security while reducing costs. IT networks can lower costs, in part because the processes and resources already established by the IT department can be applied to the surveillance function. Among these are procedures for automatic equipment software updates, continuous monitoring and maintenance of storage and edge devices status, including connectivity.
Application availability can be improved with existing redundant system designs for disaster recovery and business continuity. The key for organizations to realize these benefits will be to unify IP-based video surveillance with infrastructure security. Achieving this integration requires the physical security group to partner with IT in addressing security issues holistically, allowing each group to focus on what it does best; in the case of physical security operations, that is ensuring the safety and security of people and assets.
When involved in such a convergence project, it is possible to run into some resistance from IT. After all, IT is understandably concerned about the performance, cost and information security implications of suddenly adding volumes of video content to the network, servers and storage systems.
With network-based surveillance, security personnel can view live and recorded video from any network-attached device throughout the organization. This keeps them on top of what’s happening in multiple places; officers are no longer physically restricted to viewing video from a limited number of monitors hardwired to a coax video system in a security control center. A network technology called multicast, along with advances in image compression algorithms, minimizes the impact of additional video on network bandwidth. Multicast essentially is a subscription-based broadcast to all authorized requesting parties. Rather than sending multiple copies of the same camera video through the network, which consumes additional bandwidth, multicast facilitates transmission of a single copy of the video through the network thereby reducing bandwidth usage.
With a fixed number of ports, matrix switches are limited in how many cameras they can support, and expanding them requires additional equipment and cabling. This has resulted in multiple surveillance “silos” throughout large organizations. By contrast, network-enabled cameras and recording/storage servers can easily plug into scalable and efficient IT network switches. With a packet/frame-based protocol, such as Ethernet, multiple camera streams can be aggregated at the edge of the network, which can then leverage the same single connection (port) for most of their transport over the IP network.
Network-based video also heightens security because it makes it possible to correlate information from other systems. For example, point-of-sale (POS) data can be linked to networked video so that the footage can be tagged and then scanned for transactions, such as refunds or “no sale” operations when cash register drawers are open. In other words, investigations can be conducted more quickly with event-tagged video.
It becomes unnecessary to replace existing coax-based surveillance gear with the ability to send video from any camera to an encoder connected to the network. The encoder will digitize the analog video and network-enable it, even with old video control keyboards. Thus, you now have the ability to integrate different vendors’ proprietary surveillance systems so that they interoperate, using the IP network as the unifying platform (see figure).