Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence are transforming human lives in ways beyond imagination. A Gartner study estimates that there will be over 20 billion connected devices worldwide by 2020. With the IoT segment connecting devices like CCTV cameras, surveillance drones and body-worn cameras, the surveillance industry will be able to offer improved services and efficiencies to various markets. The evolution of data analytics driven by the compute power has enabled surveillance applications to store data at the edge. With this, a lot of emphasis comes on surveillance and storage of surveillance data. The predicted growth of India’s video surveillance market at a CAGR of nearly 13% during 2017-2023 is a sign of things to come.
The surveillance industry itself has evolved. Edge devices and mesh networks have facilitated surveillance through mobile devices. Surveillance cameras are also mobile now, with them being used for crop supervision in agriculture, law enforcement and more .
These developments in the surveillance industry can be attributed primarily to two factors – a sharp decline in component costs and the technology advances made possible by edge computing and mesh networks. Edge devices such as body-worn cameras and drones have changed the way industries such as agriculture, manufacturing, emergency response, and security keep tabs on what’s happening.
Surveillance cameras are getting smaller, while the data they capture is growing larger. So what’s enabling these new edge devices to capture all of this data? The ability to store data at the edge. Storage options are also advancing every day, from HDD to microSD cards, and more.
NAND Flash technology enables IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) applications such as video surveillance to capture and store video at the edge, directly onto a camera. This facilitates faster performance, prolonged endurance and rapid response to security issues.
Video surveillance involves data capture from multiple cameras operating at high speeds and high resolutions, resulting in generation of huge volumes of data. All this data requires a communication infrastructure with high bandwidth to be moved to servers. The housing server also needs to have high capacity, with a considerably large bandwidth communications network to accept the data.
Authored by Charlene Wan, Marketing Programs Director and Balaji Sivakumar, Director of Product Marketing at Western Digital