Managing Surveillance

Surveillance tools have become the need of the hour for every CIO. A look at the challenges and issues enterprises face in securing and monitoring the premises and how they can do so effectively By Jasmine Desai

Located in the Indian state of Gujarat, Junagadh attracts a large number of tourists and pilgrims who visit various historical locations as well as places of religious importance in the city. While there are more than 2000 police personnel deployed in the Junagadh district, the city law enforcement authorities wanted to install a video surveillance solution as an additional monitoring tool to assist police teams. The solution was intended to help monitor and keep track of suspicious vehicular movement at the entry/exit points of the city as well as other critical locations.

The solution was to be implemented in phases. The first phase of the project was to cover all major entry and exit points as well as other critical areas of the city of Junagadh. The solution consisted of network cameras (XIS P1343 and 215 PTZ-E) from Axis Communications, which were installed at eight different locations spread all over the city. The solution also included the implementation of a complete wireless monitoring and storage facility at the Superintendent of Police (SP) headquarters in Junagadh that helps to monitor strategic places such as a dam and places of religious importance which are potential terrorist targets. The Director General of Police of the State of Gujarat has sanctioned funds to be utilized in further upgrades of this initiative.

“We were looking to execute a surveillance system across Junagadh city to help supplement the police personnel’s efforts in monitoring the critical city areas. It was prohibitively costly to use fiber connectivity or connectivity offered by telecom or ISP companies. We did not have the budget to pay the recurrent amount year on year for data usage. Esec brought in their own wireless solution along with the Axis network cameras,” says Dipankar Trivedi, Superintendent of Police, Junagadh. (Esec Technologies is a Maharashtra-based supplier of security solutions.)

Once implemented, the control room set up at the SP office enables round-the-clock, centralized and remote monitoring of all these locations instead of relying only on conventional methods of patrolling and local intelligence. The solution is designed to allow easy scalability in the future, complying with the Junagadh police’s requirement for scaling up the first phase of installation. The department foresees deployment of a minimum of 20-25 cameras in the next two phases. The department is also looking at integrating other functions of city surveillance such as the possibility of integrating Automatic Number Plate Recognition System (ANPRS) and video analytics.

Junagadh is not alone in its attempt to deploy surveillance solutions for heightened security. More and more police forces, government organizations and enterprises are supplementing their security efforts with video surveillance equipment and solutions, especially in the aftermath of growing incidents of terror attacks, sabotage and theft. As per an IMS report, in 2013 the video surveillance market in India is pegged at $272 million out of which $76.2 million is estimated to be just networked video. By 2016, the market is estimated to grow to $463 million and networked video will be $223.8 million. Overall, the video surveillance market is growing at 20% annually. Also, in 2016, IP-based surveillance will overtake analog-based surveillance in terms of revenue.
One cannot underestimate the importance of security surveillance in our day and age. However, while organizations and cities at large have invested hugely in surveillance tools, the big challenge lies in post-implementation and lack of knowledge on utilizing these tools optimally.

Mentions Ashish Raina, Principal Analyst, Gartner, “India is still an evolving market. We were not even automated, the cost of developing this solution earlier was quite high and the civic sense was very low. Thus, it was limited only to some large enterprises and certain units like IT, R&D, where there was confidential data.” Even from IT service perspective, compliance issues makes it necessary that there is no data theft, thereby leading to installations of these tools. From compliance driven usage it escalated later, into commercial spaces when large retail outlets started deploying surveillance. Presently, more than ever we are required to manage it in a much more formal and organized way.

The best practices
Surveillance management and its surrounding best practices is not as tricky as organizations might assume. Scalability and reliability are extremely essential when it comes to it. According to Sharmila Saha, Vice President and Head of IVSS at Mindtree Limited, “The surveillance management software should be standards compatible so that it is future proof. It should support cameras from multiple vendors and be ONVIF ready so that customers are not tied to a particular brand of camera.”

Says Sridhar Pinnapureddy, Founder & CEO, CtrlS Datacenters, “There should be a proper integration of the camera with video and access control. An ideal network with sufficient bandwidth and compression capabilities to transfer dynamic images captured in high-resolution, is critical to optimized performance.”

C.G. Prasad, Director – Information Systems, Premier Inn India Pvt Ltd, says, “If an organization is very mature in its outlook of surveillance systems, it will try to have a DR system for the backup storage. They store backup data and replicate it both on-premise and off-premise so that business continuity is not affected. The end-point devices should be tamper-proof, but that is not often the case in India as there are no rules or regulations around it.” Premier Inn has installed Cisco and Honeywell surveillance tools, using IP and analog CCTV devices, covering the entry and exit points and the entire property. They also keep a backup of these recordings.

According to Trimax IT Infrastructure and Services Ltd, organizations have to put a lot of effort in continual monitoring of surveillance. 24X7 multiple trained staff needs to be deployed for monitoring. They also need to train specifically toward disaster management as they need to take the corrective action if they see any threat. Nowadays, organizations have also been investing in static IP-based monitoring to view the footage from anywhere, any time.

Mentions Sudhindra Holla, Country Manager, Axis Communications, “Integration of access control and video surveillance is one of the latest trends. It is better to go with open standards. Traditionally, they are proprietary in nature. Analytics is also coming into the picture wherein organizations can have the facility to record only what is needed. This helps in saving the storage as well as bandwidth.”

A single breach can lead to major disaster and that is why ensuring best practices is extremely vital. Organizations should do regular internal audits and keep on upgrading these tools. Organizations should check if they [tools] are strategically placed. Also, organizations need not lax in this area just because no offenders have been caught in months.

The hurdles
Lack of awareness and planning can bring unforeseen challenges in dealing with surveillance tools. One of the major challenges that organizations face is that they require huge bandwidth. The network needs to be designed properly or else it would get choked. There is also knowledge related issues in terms of end-customers that do not have lot of knowledge in handling these equipments. People need to be educated when they are shifting from analogue to IP based surveillance.

Mentions Pinnapureddy of CtrlS, “The growing need for organizations to stretch the retention period of captured data from 30 days to 90 days and in some cases, even 365 days is creating demand for high capacity storage systems and even high performance computing and memory. The correlation between different events and cameras is becoming challenging.” Predicting the needs (HD, higher bandwidth, etc.) of various users in the organization is turning more complex due to rapid growth and ever evolving dynamics of the office environment.

According to Saha of MindTree, “The network is the heart of the system and it is imperative to ensure it is up all the time. Another important aspect is the storage infrastructure for easy management and retrieval of stored videos.”

India is a very different country and our use cases are very different from other countries. Our requirements are different from Europe and US. Says Raina of Gartner, “Our civic sense is very low. It is taken as a secondary thing. It should have a legal impetus. The requirement has to be in sync with local requirements. Here it is polluted, there is lot of dust, lot of smog. The cameras need to be dust resistant. They also need to be made cheaper.”

More challenges lie in terms of organizations’ lack of awareness in optimally utilizing these tools. Sometimes, organizations put these tools in place and do not use it. They do not utilize the data. If you have these systems then there should be a dedicated security department and a security team.

In the India context, the legal department should write down strong measures in terms of what should organizations follow and be legally bound to have effective surveillance in place. Mentions Prasad of Premier Inn, “Organizations should have a system where it is mandatory to store data of particular days. In India, the security system has been a precarious thing and it has not been given much attention. There have to be strict measures to implement it.”

India is a diverse market with diverse needs. Organizations and vendors need to work more on spreading awareness and training to make surveillance management hassle-free. How many incidents do we need before the lesson—that security cannot be compromised—is driven home?

jasmine.desai@expressindia.com