Nigel Edwards, Vice President Sales & Marketing, EMEAI, Western Digital explores how rising video resolution and AI-powered analytics are reshaping surveillance storage and why capacity and performance are now critical to effective security.
The European smart video market has witnessed a significant growth over the past years and is set to further increase at an 12% annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2031, according to KBV Research.
The UK remains one of the dominating regions in this segment, exhibiting a healthy CAGR of more than 11% during the same period.
Businesses of any size, ranging from governments and local transportation agencies to hospitals and national retailers, are relying on smart, AI-enhanced surveillance systems to extract insights from video data to better understand their operations, security, and customer experience.
One aspect that is driving the smart video revolution is high resolution cameras delivering precise details into captured events.
These recorded video streams are fed into algorithms and turned into actionable insights.
Filming in higher resolutions for AI, however, has a direct impact on processes and backend infrastructure, especially on the data storage setup.
Whenever the quality of the incoming video stream increases, storage capacity in turn is doubling or even tripling.
In addition to this, new AI capabilities are pushing performance requirements exponentially, demanding ever faster systems.
For IT decision makers, smart video operators and video surveillance system integrators this means that they are under extreme pressure to keep storage infrastructures functioning at scale.
From too little capacity to too complex or too many video streams, any system insufficiency can cause data losses, latency issues, lack of storage capacity or degraded image quality.
Ultimately, these challenges can negatively impact the effectiveness of AI-powered smart video applications and will make it increasingly difficult to maintain operational efficiency and meet business goals.
To meet these new capacity, performance and reliability needs of AI-enabled video surveillance systems, organisations must investigate solutions that go beyond the traditional desktop storage.
According to Colliers, shopping centers like Westfield in London (approx. 28 million visitors annually) and other brick and mortar stores are using smart detection to measure footfall, track theft in real-time and optimise concession sales.
High-security institutions like government buildings or hospitals are using facial recognition to prevent unauthorised access to restricted sensitive areas.
All these applications only work if the right data is identified, recorded, logged and fed into the AI-powered algorithms and analysed.
To do so, more footage (including multiple video streams, metadata and still photos), higher quality video and other metadata are required.
Businesses should move beyond traditional desktop storage when connecting high-resolution cameras, recorders and analytics engines as today’s systems demand continuous write performance, high read throughput and reliable long-term data retention.
Desktop drives are not suited for this workload. Instead, users should deploy purpose-built smart video HDDs that offer 24/7 reliability, better thermal management, optimised firmware for sequential writes, and the capability to record multiple high-resolution streams.
In the AI era, storage solutions must align to and scale with businesses smart video surveillance requirements.
They need to be reliable, dependable, and easily accessible for both AI-based applications and human analysts.
Not meeting these needs can lead to data loss, system downtime, compromised analytics accuracy, and ultimately, operational and security risks.
To help meet these smart video storage demands, here are three considerations:
Organisations may be tempted to decrease or lower video quality to lower storage requirements and save money.
This, however, means that these businesses would be losing the value and detail of higher resolutions cameras.
Not leveraging the advantage of the higher resolution video will decrease the return of invest (ROI) and, in the worst case, invalidate the analytics investment.
IT decision makers and smart video operators should therefore make sure that their storage aligns with the camera capabilities.
To do so, they should do an extensive analysis of the organisation’s needs and provide a clear plan of how to capture and scale video assets to achieve business goals in the most cost-efficient manner.
With the current data explosion, IT decision makers almost always underestimate the volume of storage capacity they require for their smart video systems.
This is especially true if they are using high-resolution cameras.
To estimate the storage space correctly, there is a general rule of thumb: each time the resolution improves, from 480p to 720p, 1080p, 4k, 8k and now even 12k, the amount of needed capacity doubles or triples.
It is important to keep in mind that resolution is not the only determining factor for storage capacity.
For smooth motion capture, better object recognition, optimised forensic value and compatibility with analytic engines, businesses need to capture multiple streams and higher frame rates.
Both are aspects that can increase data volumes significantly.
Additionally, retention period requirements can affect the required storage space as well.
Depending on the organisation, the industry, internal policies and/or investigative needs, these timelines can vary widely.
Considering that many AI-enabled systems are still in their infancy, it is astonishing what they can already achieve today and what they will be able to do in five years’ time.
The mix of high(er)-resolution cameras and intelligent technologies has been nothing but amazing.
No matter where AI will take us, there is one thing that is already very clear: Artificial Intelligence is a data-hungry beast and will require ever more capacity and higher performance to smoothly implement and execute future capabilities.
If businesses don’t plan their storage systems accordingly, they will be missing out on all the advantages of new functionalities and innovations.
As a decision maker, scalability and growth in both capacity and performance should become the top two considerations for future-proofing the smart video infrastructure.
Today, intelligent video surveillance is a growing opportunity for many businesses and IT decision makers should take their systems to the next level with high-resolution cameras and powerful AI.
However, to be able to fully analyse and install cost-effective, scalable storage solutions, organisations need to know their surveillance needs first and align flexibility, density and reliability demands with performance requirements.
After all, security systems are only as good as the storage solutions that support them and only with the right IT infrastructure in place will businesses be able to safeguard the value of their investments.
This article was originally published in the November edition of Security Journal UK. To read your FREE digital edition, click here.
