Smarter Infrastructure
Safer cities count on efficient and advanced solutions for sustainable operations
- By Brandon Reich
- Dec 01, 2018
Smart city initiatives
are growing across the
globe, as leaders look
to increase security
and intelligence across
metropolitan environments.
At the heart of these projects
is the deployment of efficient and advanced
solutions to help ensure safe,
intelligent and sustainable operations.
The data from these sources is what
drives more proactive security operations
and stronger risk management.
The backbone of any smart city is the
information collected and analyzed from
an array of connected devices.
Although an intelligent infrastructure
is the foundation of a smart city because
it allows key stakeholders to quickly and
efficiently manage and access data, in essence,
the growth of the smart city market
is driven by the Internet of Things (IoT).
Increasing IoT deployments and the rising
demand for other smart technologies
create the ability to coordinate data, applications
and services across domains for
multiple stakeholders.
This market is only growing: Analysis
from Frost & Sullivan forecasts that smart
cities will create tremendous business opportunities
with a global market value of
more than $2 trillion by 2025, driven by an
increased adoption of Big Data analytics,
increased connectivity and higher interest
in IoT devices and services.
Video Data
Video surveillance is a key part of any
smart city program because it helps operators
gain higher levels of situational
awareness and intelligence. Over time, cities
have built substantial video networks,
but these solutions are often decentralized,
outdated, prone to failures and costly
to maintain—essentially, they are still
built around the analog approach of the
past. With increased interest in connected
devices and AI-driven tools, such as realtime
analytics, there is a critical need to
update infrastructures to fully obtain the
benefits of new technology.
The landscape of video surveillance
and security is changing as rapidly as the
IoT market. Higher resolution and IP
cameras are expected, and new use cases,
including body-worn, traffic management
and in-vehicle cameras, are introduced on
a daily basis. Users also want to retain
data for longer periods of time. The result
is that the data being generated and stored
by surveillance systems is exploding.
In addition to effectively monitoring,
storing, securing, processing and mobilizing
data from hundreds to thousands of
cameras and sensors spread across a city
at all times, a city’s IT infrastructure solution
must integrate seamlessly with existing
and new IoT technologies and support
the multi-use case demands of smart
city initiatives. Traditional infrastructure solutions are not designed to withstand
the data generated from IoT sensors, new
video uses and enterprise-class video deployments
and therefore often fall short of
fulfilling the goals of smart city initiatives.
What all this leads to is an increase in cost
and complexity, and at worst case, poorly
planned deployments that create an overall
inability of security and video surveillance
systems to do the job they were initially
designed to do.
A Smarter Approach
The biggest challenge with these programs
is how to effectively store and manage
captured video and aligned data, and because
the perceived value of video has
increased, stakeholders must ensure this
critical information is protected. Instances
in which live or recorded video becomes
inaccessible and data is lost can lead to
compliance issues, vulnerabilities and operational
shutdowns. Therefore, assuring
the protection of video data is paramount
to any smart city initiative.
Technologies once traditionally relied
on to store video, such as NVRs and DVRs,
cannot provide the performance or reliability
needed for the large-scale IoT and security
deployments we’re seeing in today’s
environment. Traditional enterprise storage
appliances are often too expensive and
complex for video-specific deployments because
they are not designed to manage the
write-intensive nature of video data.
Storage and data management platforms
that deliver robust enterprise-class
IT capabilities through advanced levels
of video and data protection, system performance
and cost efficiencies are the future
of smart city deployments. One such
option is hyper converged infrastructure
(HCI), which allows for the consolidation
of video management, IoT data collection,
video and data analytics, storage, access
control and other related applications
onto a simple to deploy, easy to manage
converged infrastructure.
HCI streamlines video management
and storage capabilities by hosting software,
servers and storage management
on a single platform. This technology is
ideal for security and IoT applications
because it offers extreme resilience, which
is important in mission-critical environments
that have demanding data protection
and retention requirements in order
to mitigate risk and ensure compliance.
If multiple hardware failures occur, servers
remain online and previously recorded
data is protected and available when needed.
Furthermore, HCI can support mixed
workloads and can host multiple applications
on a single infrastructure, delivering
significant return on investment as a city’s
security and IT needs evolve.
HCI also eliminates the complexity of
managing separate physical servers and
storage, and provides a more seamless
way to scale the infrastructure as camera
or sensor counts grow and analytics demands
increase. This facilitates a smooth
expansion as funding for smart city initiatives
expands or data retention requirements
change. Furthermore, a single
point of management provides operators
and IT staff with a centralized view of
the entire environment.
The Future is Today
The biggest challenge with today’s Safe
City programs is how to effectively store
and manage captured data. Often times,
the volume of video information collected
from modern systems can be overwhelming.
IoT devices and intelligent platforms
will help cities identify what data is most
valuable to their operations. But ensuring
the protection of security data is critical to
this endeavor.
HCI is just one of the new IT solutions
that can have a positive impact on a city’s
security efforts. There are many emerging
solutions to consider and evaluate as
metropolitan environments seek to modernize
their operations. With innovations
being introduced on a daily basis, the sky
is the limit.
This article originally appeared in the November/December 2018 issue of Security Today.