It seems that every trade magazine and software company is trying to talk you into moving to the Cloud. They are all painting this picture of total tranquility with “life in the cloud”. Personally, I just don’t think Security is ready to make the jump into the Cloud with something as storage intense as video surveillance images.
Two simple facts to tell the C Suite next time they say they suggest you move everything to the “Cloud” to save money and improve performance:
#1: The CEO wants a ROI. Increased picture quality per camera has a higher ROI than adding more cameras. Since the average picture quality of commercial grade video will soon be 4K (four times better than HDTV) onsite storage will need to be 300 Terabytes OR network upload speeds will have to be fast enough to allow 3 Terabytes to be sent to central storage every night. In 3-5 years 300TB of storage locally will be affordable; 3TB bandwidth for overnight cloud storage will not.
#2: Your Job is NOT secure if you don’t take the lead. Physical Security is a C-Suite concern. Electronic Security tools need to operate at higher standards than networks. The value of proactively using these technologies will continue to expand into competitive advantages. The C-Suite needs experts to rely upon. When Electronic Security systems are properly designed, they are completely immune to Internet hackers, unlike cloud based storage solutions.
So, next time the CEO, COO or CFO asks you to consider discontinuing local storage for your Enterprise Video Security infrastructure, suggest nicely that:
- The Cloud is not ready for 4K security video storage, but you are already using the cloud for the meta data required to retrieve the pictures needed that are being stored at each business site.
- The Cloud is not reliable enough yet. Given the recent internet attacks that have prevented millions from accessing the network, we need our systems to run independent of the cloud and use the cloud for duplicate storage and case management data.
- The 100% Cloud option was analyzed in your existing technology “Roadmap” that you update and share with your superiors on an annual basis and you have already calculated what kind of costs and reliability would be required for it to be prudent to move to centralized storage for security video evidence retention and the risk of moving to 100% Cloud storage is still too high. ***
***NAVCO’s Enterprise Customers are offered an annual All Day Roadmap Review Consulting session. In follow-up, complete documentation is presented to help our customers keep up-to-date on their technology needs, budgets and tipping points to new technologies as part of our partnership toward their success. Moving to 100% Cloud is one of those tipping point technologies analyzed on an annual basis. If your Security Partner is not doing this for you, you might want to consider finding a better partner.
