Already the darling of a growing number of enterprise information executives, going into the cloud has come to their security brethren, bringing the same business advantages but also, not surprisingly, the same risks.
The surveillance industry has seen a massive amount of innovation in the past decade. New technologies, revised efficiency requirements and an information-centric workforce all continue to demand new approaches. However, in most cases, these innovations – ranging from IP networks and remote access to intelligent search technology – lag several years behind similar advancements in the IT sector.
With market analysis firm International Data Corporation (IDC) predicting $72.9 billion in cloud-related revenues by 2015, the cloud as the preferred storage and application environment is the future. Additionally, the IDC study indicates that by 2015, spending on public cloud services will account for nearly half of the net new growth in overall IT spending. This spending includes money spent on application development and deployment, infrastructure, storage, and servers.
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.
And then found. Among the cameras, servers, alarms, readers, smart cards and other dazzlers at last month’s ISC West in Las Vegas, the technology-centric security trade show, a reasonably new face appeared, seemingly out of thin air. Call it cloud computing or hosted services or remote managed services or software as a service or video as a service.
Amajor theme at this month’s ISC West in Las Vegas is the continued movement of security applications to the Internet, what some call “in the cloud” and others label Software as a Service or SaaS.
At the ISC West conference in 2009, I saw a great keynote speech delivered by Lt. General Kenneth Minihan, former Director of both the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and the National Security Agency (NSA).
More than half of midsize companies are planning to increase their information technology (IT) budgets over the next 12 to 18 months, according to an IBM global study of more than 2,000 midsize companies representing more than 20 countries.
