Back in the late 1980s, Wendy’s Hamburgers chain produced a very popular television commercial making fun of McDonald’s McNuggets chicken pieces. Customers ordering McNuggets at the counter would ask, “What’s in ‘em?” The blasé server behind the counter tries to explain that the nuggets are a combination of many pieces of chicken before finally concluding, “Parts is parts!”
While the definition of the expanding Internet of Things (IoT) may be a bit more complicated than “parts is parts,” the security industry does sometimes struggle with defining how IoT solutions may influence problems users and integrators are trying to solve. When it comes to the dynamics of video surveillance systems, the spectrum of IoT solutions is gaining traction from storage options to expanding network capacity. But as Ken Mills, the GM for Industry IoT Surveillance and Computer Vision at Dell EMC tells it, no customer has ever come up to him say they needed an IoT surveillance solution.
"What we have are customers coming to us saying, ‘I have 10,000 cameras, 5,000 cameras, 1,000 cameras because resolutions and frame rates and things like that are going up. I have a lot of storage capacity, needs lots of servers. We want to look at things like virtualization. I'm trying to build a more viable and scalable and a more resilient platform for my video-surveillance infrastructure. Because we're not building two of these.’ Most surveillance customers aren't buying fully redundant platforms like a lot of IT customers do across their applications,” says Mills. “So once you unpack that conversation and dig into what their needs actually are, it ends up looking much like our IoT solution for surveillance, which is designed to help customers solve, at scale, those complex problems that 24/7 video surveillance brings, that frankly, not a lot of other IT applications bring to the market. Very few IT applications are 24/7, high-I/O, have very little tolerance for failure and latency. I mean, you can think of many, many IT applications where a second or two latency is not a big deal. But in video, it can mean a completely unusable image.”
This week at the ISC West 2019, Dell Technologies has teamed with the National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security (NCS4) to share how the IoT Solution for Surveillance helped their organization increase stadium security and provide a rapid return on investment by implementing a smarter, scalable, and seamless surveillance infrastructure utilizing automation and virtualization.
How to Ensure IT Metrics Translate to the Physical Security World
Providing a perspective built on a physical security roadmap using IT metrics can be difficult to translate to enterprise-scale end users looking for a security-first approach. But Mills is conscious that although much of the high-quality enterprise infrastructure Dells offers for its myriad use cases can comingle across multiple applications and data platforms, the vast majority of surveillance and physical security clients are hesitant to do it – whether it be or compliance or simple internal policy reasons.
“The technical reason is often if you need 500 terabytes or a petabyte of storage or three petabytes of storage, most of our customers in the IT department aren't sitting around looking for ways to fill up 500 terabytes or a petabyte of storage. It's not just sitting there empty. You have to buy infrastructure to support the storage or at least the computer requirements for those applications,” Mills explains. “With that being the case, most customers are looking to buy it as dedicated infrastructure. But that doesn't mean they don't want it to be managed and treated like an enterprise-class IT application, which I think is the big shift that's aided in a lot of our growth. Customers are starting to really look at surveillance as an IT class, mission-critical-type application, and they want to approach it in a way that you would with an SAP or an Oracle-type application. They're looking for the same kind of resiliency and performance that they would get there.”
As the IoT world reveals some propensity for a foundational security program that pushes devices like video cameras from the edge to a distributed core and then into the cloud, users want to be able to build in some segmentation. End users and administrators want to be able to push OTA updates and have security patches in real time, like general computer software that runs network and non-security functions. A growing list of users want to know how this approach may help with the video-surveillance aspect and really magnify the security protections?
“I think that's something that we really have focused on for a number of years. The market has started to think about that across the whole stack, right? Which firmware is on my camera? Is in my data encrypted in transit, is it encrypted at rest when it's on the platform, does it have the right security protocol? That stuff is really starting to become something that people are asking about and thinking about much more than they used, which is great,” says Mills. “One of the things that we really try to do, especially with the IoT platforms that we continue to build on, is built in what we call Dell design and security. We can make sure that the system is operating the way it's supposed to be. We can automate the checks of all the firmware across all the servers. We can make sure that you can test the server security before deploying it. We can do non-destructive upgrades real time.
“The goal is to ensure that the orchestration and automation functionality built into this solution are really aimed at simplifying long-term life-cycle management of the infrastructure. We also need to ensure that the system is operating in a known way that is secure. And if there's anything that is not correct, it can be isolated, turned off, and prevented from providing the additional risk on the network or on the infrastructure. That's a big thing that we build into our systems and all components.”
Video Surveillance Drives Innovation
Mills is seeing a savvier customer that requires higher functionality and customization options in their physical security systems in general and for video surveillance, in particular.
“This market is really in transition treating surveillance-like technologies similar to enterprise IT applications. With that kind of mindset, we're seeing customers look at AI in a very different way. Most of the VMS applications out there don't always have native-tiering architecture or tiering data structures within the application. But now, when you look at AI and computer vision as a whole and you start to apply that to video, very often you need a high-performance tier and you need a long-term-archive tier because you need the benefits and performance of Tier 1, but you don't want pay for that premium across the entire length of your storage. As we all know, the longer you keep the video data, the less valuable it typically gets for individual organizations. You want keep the near-term stuff that you're still analyzing and making decisions on in as simple a bucket as possible so you can maximize the TCO or minimize the cost of the application,” Mills explains. “Tiering architecture is starting to become much more prevalent, where you might want do facial recognition or license-plate-recognition or all of the above all on your cameras in that first tier. Once you've determined your needs -- to keep it for posterity or for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days -- whatever, you move it off to a lower-cost tier. That's a big shift in the marketplace that we see coming rapidly."
Mills adds that just like the IT market, customers are looking for multi-cloud options, Those customers in the surveillance space are looking at cloud as an option and are looking to explore it where it makes sense. But just like their IT counterparts, they don't want to be locked into a single-cloud solution. They want a flexible, multi-cloud approach.
“So maybe Google has got a better cloud option or maybe Azure does, or Amazon does or maybe Iron Mountain does. Clients want to be able to pick where their infrastructure lands without having to be vendor-locked-in from a cloud point of view. That's a big shift that we see in this marketplace that's becoming a bigger factor as we talk with enterprise customers and big government customers,” Mills points out.
How to Solve the Sports Venue Security Issue
Mills, who serves on the advisory board for NCS4, admits there has been a shift related to how major sports venues are conceived, built and used today. He says that in past years most sports venues were constructed as stand-alone facilities far away from their respective fan base, and once the event concluded, the venue and the surrounding areas emptied. That is not the case with new concepts in New York’s Meadowlands, Detroit’s downtown sports center, and other new venues that now house sports and entertainment complexes like Phoenix and the Atlanta Braves’ recently opened Battery complex. The IoT surveillance solution offered by Dell is a perfect compliment to these video-centric security venues.
“The amount of security requirements needed to protect various events in these new mega-type venues is so different than it used to be. It's not just 16 football games. It's 200 concerts and 380 meetings. It's all these different things that security must deal with. It's changed the threat profile dramatically for the operators of these venues. They must really be concerned about who's coming to the venue, not just who comes through their gates for a game. Not only who's tailgating, but who is at the hotel, who is at the entertainment district, who is getting off the train, where are they coming from and when they got on the train. This perimeter of security and threats has changed dramatically for these folks,” stressed Mills, prompting the added emphasis with solutions providers like Dell partnering with sports organizations like NCS4. “They're having to look at a whole different set of technologies to address this expanding security concern, which is great. Unfortunately, there's been instances and situations that have also changed the public's perception of how safe these venues are and how safe people expect them to be, so there's some pressure on these venues to make sure that they're doing the right things, just due to public awareness. The business profile has changed dramatically. Safety expectations have changed dramatically. The perimeters have changed dramatically. And so, the technology required has really changed significantly.”
About the Author:
Steve Lasky is the Editorial Director of Endeavor’s SecurityInfoWatch Security Media, which includes print publications Security Technology Executive, Security Business, Locksmith Ledger Int’l, and the world’s most trafficked security web portal SecurityInfoWatch.com. He is a 30-year veteran of the security industry and a 27-year member of ASIS.
