Among organizations currently using video surveillance technology, 91 percent indicate that IT manages or supports these deployments, according to the 2013 IT and Video Surveillance Market Study from IT market research firm Enterprise Strategy Group and Axis Communications.

Of the final survey pool of IT professionals involved with video surveillance at mid- to enterprise-sized organizations, 47 percent claim their department is the group most responsible for setting surveillance strategy and making final infrastructure purchasing decisions.

According to ESG Senior Principal Analyst Jon Oltsik: "Given the inevitable shift from outdated analog CCTV to superior IP video systems, a number of technical factors, such as network infrastructure requirements, bandwidth usage and data storage consumption, are moving surveillance decisions beyond the realm of physical security and directly impacting IT. The ESG research indicates those IT departments that include surveillance requirements in their IT strategy and leverage video for business process improvement tend to maximize the benefits of surveillance investments while reducing unnecessary operations overhead."

The study indicates that the rise of the IT professional in video surveillance is a recent development – just three years ago only 52 percent of video surveillance deployments were supported by IT.

Forty-seven percent of IT respondents claim they have the most influence on final infrastructure and hardware purchasing decisions, followed by senior management (23 percent), physical security/loss prevention (9 percent), compliance (9 percent), facilities (5 percent) and legal (5 percent).

According to the report, best practices for video surveillance involving IT include:

• Leveraging surveillance for business intelligence (BI): A surprisingly high percentage (80%) of IT pros use video footage for BI. Use cases include identifying operational efficiencies (58%), production or process control (51%), inventory control (50%), identifying traffic patterns (49%) and employee training (47%).
•  Using BI to justify IP video investment: For those using surveillance for BI across the organization, 88% say it helps justify IP video technology and infrastructure investments.
•  Utilizing data retention and cloud replication procedures: Forty-six percent dedicate 11-25 terabytes (TB) for surveillance data storage, and 35% between 6-10 TB. Additionally, counter to the traditional physical security mindset for storing video surveillance, 40% of IT respondents leverage cloud-based services to store video data.
• Creating a technology migration plan: For organizations that use a mix of IP video and analog CCTV, 68% have a formal plan to migrate equipment to IP-based systems.

Top challenges cited for proper IP video design and implementation include:

• The search and retrieval of footage (30 percent)
• The impact on network bandwidth (29 percent)
• The difficulty of IT to manage growing volumes of video surveillance (25 percent)