7 Emerging Surveillance Trends and Security Industry Insights for 2025

An OpenEye article with: Brent Boekestein, Vice President of Enterprise Accounts, and Ian Siemer, Vice President of Product Management and Marketing

2025 is expected to be a year defined by technological innovations and smart solutions designed for enhanced business operations and improved security.

In the security industry alone, the advancements of last year are already paving the way for new products and needs from users. We sat down with Brent Boekestein, OpenEye’s VP of Enterprise Accounts, and Ian Siemer, OpenEye’s VP of Product Management and Marketing, to discuss 7 of these emerging surveillance trends and industry insights and what they mean for the larger security world.

1. Going Cloud to Stay Secure

Historically, there has been a perception that staying offline or limiting online access can make systems more secure. “Really, that's a bit like giving your kid a Monster energy drink, leaving them alone in a room, and hoping that everything's going to turn out okay,” says Ian Siemer.

The reality of the situation is that in order to be protected, you need to be connected.

Connected is Protected

While it may seem counterintuitive, being connected to the internet helps users more effectively adhere to IT and security best practices, with benefits including:

• The ability to monitor the health of all your connected systems and respond to them to make sure that video is available when you need it.
• The ability to audit and track user and system activity to highlight anomalies for security purposes.
• The ability to generate audit reports for all connected hardware and their firmware versions for compliance.
• The ability to regularly push out patches for systems via automated updates to address vulnerabilities and make sure that systems don't fall out of date.
• The ability to monitor real-time threat detection to better protect employees, customers, or students.

Centralized user and permission management is another big benefit of being connected. Users aren't allowed to use default passwords, and everyone must have their own unique account, significantly boosting the security of your system. Additionally, multi-factor authentication ensures these systems are secured.

There may be lingering questions circulating having your video security online such as: What if I left my system offline? What if I just didn't connect to the internet at all? How would that be insecure?

To answer those questions, we need to determine the reason organizations have surveillance systems in the first place: to respond to incidents.

For example, there may be a time when you need to export video to share with either law enforcement, insurance agencies, or other internal groups. If your system isn’t online, what do you do to connect to that system? You plug in your thumb drive or your portable hard drive.

However, using an external device raises its own questions. Is that device secure? If it is, are there the proper security patches on the recorder side now that can protect against that unapproved hardware being connected to it? What was the audit trail of that thumb drive once it was removed from that system? Once it was downloaded on someone else's PC to view that video, did they delete it off that thumb drive? Is that thumb drive now compromised?

Realistically, the ability to have your system totally disconnected and protected is nearly impossible.

Being online allows you to password-protect shared video, gives you a better chain of custody, and it removes friction that can cause lapses in adherence to policy, making it easier and simpler for organizations to follow security best practices.

2. Focus on What You Brew Best, let SaaS Manage the Rest

A few years ago, Jeff Bezos was speaking to a group of entrepreneurs at Y Combinator. He used a beer-brewing analogy, saying that brewers should focus only on what made their beer taste insanely better in terms of making decisions about where to spend time and resources. This perfectly applies to how security professionals spend their time, as well as the importance of choosing a VSaaS (Video Surveillance as a Service).

“What we're starting to see is businesses getting rid of that heavy lift of managing their security infrastructure so they can devote more resources to improving their business operations,” says Brent Boekestein. “By opting for a VSaaS model, your chosen security vendor will deliver value to your organization month after month by seeking new ways to improve and enhance your system, so you and your organization can focus less on shipping NVRs and handling patches and more on what makes whatever your company’s beer is...taste insanely better.”

3. Buyers are More Informed

Video surveillance is not a new technology. It isn’t uncommon to see buyers who have owned or used two, three, or more systems previously. Because of this prior experience with multiple systems, most buyers are in the position of knowing what they do or don’t want out of their video security. Today, organizations have more specific operational needs, ease of use requirements, and a greater desire for return on investment.

What was once an arms race to add more and more capabilities to cameras and recorders is slowing. There are no longer these massive leaps in terms of hardware. The average megapixel specifications, channel count, and retention needs for users are well below the maximum capabilities of the hardware that's on the market. What this means in practice is that consumers are making more informed decisions based on software capabilities.

It’s the Software, Silly

This isn’t to say that hardware capabilities and features won't continue to advance. Really, it’s more so that the exponential value creation has shifted from video hardware to the video security platform itself. Practically, this means advances in video analytics, centralized management, business intelligence, and cybersecurity.

This also means that the incremental value of ripping and replacing existing cameras or hardware is diminished as opposed to retrofitting or integrating existing hardware and other operations platforms. “The focus now is on bringing more locations online and deriving more of that value sooner from their video surveillance,” says Siemer. “Businesses want to uncover new insights and drive better business outcomes with their systems, not just upgrade the hardware for upgrade's sake.”

4. From Surveillance to Strategy

Hardware is plateauing. Now, software is redefining the value that video brings to an organization, and in turn how security professionals are uncovering valuable new insights for their respective companies.

“Every one of us in the security industry are emerging from the ‘dark closet’ that we've been sequestered into by the rest of the organization,” says Boekestein. “In essence, we’ve been told to go in there and just keep our people, places, and things safe. As video and the value it can deliver continue to evolve, so too do we have an opportunity as a whole industry to evolve as well. We're set up now to deliver value through all this video data we have in our clutches to operations, safety and compliance, marketing, and sales teams. There's a real opportunity to graduate from surveillance to a strategic business partner.”

Security professionals are no longer the last to find out when new stores are being opened or when a strategic business change is going to be made; instead, they can be the ones to help make those critical business decisions.

5. Integrated Platforms

Integrated platforms have been around for a while, but it’s a solution worth highlighting because of the rapidly escalating interest and adoption. There's been a notable increase in the desire for surveillance platforms to support divergent integrated solutions, aggregating their data points and having them delivered in a succinct and actionable format, with visual verification being the critical element.

Single PANE, not Single PAIN