By BS Teh, Senior Vice President of Global Sales, Seagate Technology
Many governments and city leaders in India are turning to technology to help enforce and expand public safety infrastructure. The most common ask is for a consolidated IT platform that will combine public safety information from different types and sources obtained through sensors and video surveillance will empower multi-agency collaboration.
Even though most cities around in the country are still in the planning stage for such a system, there is a growing rate of urbanization which is propelling the Indian government to start focussing on the smart cities concept, to provide improved quality of life in a city environment.Surveillance today is not just about security. It has great potential in providing more advanced public services. Take traffic for example – a video surveillance system could automatically transmit information about a traffic hazard to another system, which can then instantaneously advise drivers in the area to take an alternate route. Other connected transportation systems (rail, subway, air) within a city or region, even nationally, can also adjust and improve their efficiency accordingly, and benefit from an orderly system of instantaneously transmitted machine-to-machine transactions that helps the public move around smoothly.
There are two key trends that are spurring this boom of interest surrounding the integration of technology into a city’s public safety infrastructure – the Internet of Things (IoT) and video surveillance.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is at the center of the smart cities movement in India, paving the way with advances in data collection and data storage technology. In fact, Seagate’s market research team found that the IoT is expected to generate more than 20 zettabytes or 20 trillion gigabytes of data by 2025.
Video surveillance growth in India continues to be fuelled amidst mounting security concerns and increasing foreign and domestic threats. Every day, more public sector organizations and private businesses are migrating to high-definition digital video solutions and more active cameras.
It is expected that by 2020, the video surveillance storage market will be worth a total of USD$18.28 billion and advances like body worn cameras and traffic cameras will continue to fuel investments within the video surveillance industry. Countries such as the United States, Australia, and United Kingdom have put in place laws dictating that surveillance videos related to public places must be kept for more than six months. . As the number of cameras in India increases, such regulations will likely become more commonplace in the region and organisations will have to retain more video data for a longer time.
Watching the watchers
With the technological advances also come several prevalent issues that are counterproductive to the progress that IoT and video surveillance have been making.
One of the biggest challenges and greatest worries that governments around the region have when it comes to these new technologies is in keeping all that data secure. According to security specialists, 2016 will be the year that sees a massive increase in cyber espionage and attacks orchestrated not only by groups, but also by nation states. IoT, despite its effectiveness in improving communications and analytics, offers up a ready platform for cybercrime with an exponential number of devices that cyber-criminals can potentially infiltrate.
Adding to the decline in public trust following an information leak, insufficient data protection only adds to the budgetary strain IT departments are facing, with the average data breach costing $5.4 million, according to the Ponemon Institute.
To counter this, Gartner suggests that IoT platforms that are fragmented should be bound together to form a better ecosystem where data is shared more broadly. Similarly, IT managers will need to be responsive to threats and employ other measures other than traditional blocking to guard against cyber security issues. The use of ‘user and entity behaviour analytics, will help fulfil the adaptive security architecture’, and help to strengthen the core of an IT infrastructure system.
To protect themselves, city leaders and organisations need to take a holistic approach – one that includes technologies like anti-virus protection, firewalls, network encryption, in addition to effective people-focused policies. One of the first and easiest steps to take is to ensure that data is stored in self-encrypting drives (SEDs) to help secure devices and data from unauthorized access.
As digital cameras allow for greater resolution and clarity, they also create a pressing need for more digital storage capacity. Hence, local governments, businesses, police and security agencies should look to investing in a drive that can run smoothly round the clock, have the capacity to store HD content, and possess an in-built data recovery solution to prevent all possible data loss.