Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022.  Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Modernizing security in 2022

By Mike Koponen, Product and Solutions Marketing Manager, Video Surveillance at Quantum

With the global pandemic still moving rampant throughout the world, 2021 has seen devastated economies and bouts of political unrest that have applied increased pressure to our security capabilities. In turbulent times, it can be tempting to stick with what you know – but companies who want to overcome their security challenges will need to modernize their surveillance processes and systems.

There are a few key trends that will be important for security and IT professionals to evaluate in 2022 and beyond.

Physical security will be more prominent on CIO radars: Because video is the highest volume data type being produced in the world, many organizations are seeing a growing amount of computing, storage, networking, and system administration related costs. This, combined with video surveillance being a mission-critical aspect to many organizations achieving their security objectives, means that more CIOs will put this on their priority list for 2022. Because of this, we will see CIOs task their IT security departments with collaborating with their physical security department. Together, they should assess how they might modernize the infrastructure supporting video surveillance to lower costs, and enable more flexibility to support the use of video data to drive operational efficiencies.

IT departments should also look to applying proven technologies in the datacenter, like virtualization, hyperconverged infrastructure, and self-managed private and public clouds.

Infrastructure modernization will drive video surveillance modernization: The recent passage of the U.S. government’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill into law will result in the modernization of video surveillance infrastructure, with billions of dollars allocated for transportation, public transit, airports, ports and power and water systems more secure and resilient. Security professionals need to be prepared with plans for how they can modernize video surveillance infrastructures by improving resiliency, increasing security capabilities, lowering costs, driving efficiencies and future-proofing the infrastructure to accommodate new video surveillance technologies going forward. This should also include how to support cyber-security and physical security on common infrastructure technologies to drive standardization that will lead to improved efficiencies, lowering complexity and driving down operating costs.

Investing in new technologies will become a necessity: In the wake of international and domestic terrorism and continued political divisions, security departments will need to add higher definition cameras with longer retention periods. And because we are nearing the third year of the global pandemic and still attempting to recover economies, it will have to be done on a reduced budget.

There are a number of technologies in IT departments that are available and proven to help address this, but they have faced slow adoption due to the physical security departments and security integrators reluctance to move away from technology they are familiar with. A few examples include:

• Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI), which allows multiple applications to run on the same appliances, eliminating the need for separate servers for each application as well as provide high resiliency without needing to duplicate your infrastructure.
• Object Storage, which is a newer, more cost-effective approach to storing large amounts of data, such as video.
• Tiered Storage and Software, which moves video to other tiers of storage for long-term archival tier to reduce the costs of keeping video for long periods of time.

Security organizations should also be investing in new technologies that allow for longer term retention of video. Many companies, especially in highly regulated industries, often need to retain video for a year or more due to regulatory compliance or internal policies, but cannot afford it because traditional enterprise storage systems and public cloud options are too expensive. Adopting new systems can seem intimidating or expensive, but the technologies available (object storage, tape storage, tiering software) are well worth making the change.

2022 is a new year with new opportunities to modernize and enhance security capabilities. It’s never been more important for security professionals to re-evaluate both their physical security and network security strategies.

##

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mike has held a variety of product, marketing, and sales roles throughout a long career in the high-tech industry, particularly in the storage arena. He currently leads Product and Solutions Marketing for Quantum’s Video Surveillance Solutions Portfolio, which includes a broad range of storage and server technologies. Prior to Quantum, Mike held positions with Pivot3, NexGen Storage, and Hewlett Packard where he led the Solutions Marketing Group for HP Storage. Mike holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from North Dakota State University and an MBA from the University of Colorado. He enjoys engaging with customers, channel partners and technology alliance partners to understand their business issues and working with them to apply technology, services, and relationships to help their businesses.