Industry View

5 Musts for Advancing Video Surveillance in Security

As the use and sophistication of video surveillance systems grows, more CSOs are finding it is necessary to integrate video into overall IT security. Eric Eaton, CTO of BRS Labs, gives us the top five criteria to consider when evaluating a video surveillance solution

By Eric Eaton, CTO, BRS Labs

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As systems become more complex, it becomes more important to be able to buy compatible products from best-of-breed vendors. Even though some video surveillance vendors attempt to be one-stop shops, the customer's need for scalability and compatibility will drive the move away from proprietary camera systems to standards-based solutions. The innovation occurring in video analysis happens quickly, and the need to deploy these innovations is critical. With so much innovation and demand for deployment, it is critical that open standards be used to allow for maximum compatibility.

Digitized Video and Security

Today, a full video infrastructure includes cameras, viewing stations, video storage and recall, video analytics, and analytic processing. It may include remote monitoring or publishing video to remote locations, and it may require encryption of the video stream. Video isnâ¬"t just video any more. Video is data; data that enters the realm of IT. Like any other type of data, digitized video must be analyzed, shared, transferred, archived, searched, and more. This makes it even more crucial for video surveillance systems to comply with open standards, since they are essential to getting the most value from the data.

With video surveillance as a data technology, security personnel will have to handle video data just like any other data. Video data will have to be integrated into the data security infrastructure, electronically signed to prove it has not been tampered with, tied into the IT infrastructureâ¬"s existing permission and security systems so security can control who views it, and encoded for transmission. Incident management will be an important aspect of handling security events. In certain situationsâ¬in government facilities, for exampleâ¬when the video surveillance system sends an alert, security personnel will need to enter comments about what actions they took to mitigate a risk or handle a security event and provide audit trails. And of course, the video data must comply with industry standards if it is to be integrated into the security infrastructure.

Joint Standards Efforts

Today, standards efforts for video data are still in their infancy. Vendors have formed standards boards without actually talking with one another. Vendors and standards bodies are just beginning to look at enacting guidelines for how to plug different parts of different technologies together: How data will be transmitted, how video streams will be encoded, and so on. But these efforts are splintered.

True interoperability, however, is usually not achieved via vendor-driven organizations. Interoperable, large-scale video surveillance solutions will only be achieved with the participation of end-user organizations. By insisting on standards and compliance the industry can work towards a video surveillance solution that will be valuable and accessible to the CSO and the larger security landscape.