by Avocado Security
In recent years, the demand for video surveillance technologies has increased mainly due to high concerns for public and private security, but also due to the current need for facility-managed security. In fact, Frost & Sullivan, an analyst company, claims that by 2010 video surveillance cameras will represent a market of $ 4.09 billion, with such a figure, it would not seem that the video surveillance industry will advance in the short term.
Because security cameras are highly integrated into today's society, they play a very important role in providing security personnel with the visual image that is necessary to prevent illegal activities and solve criminal activity. However, even given the growing reliance on surveillance technologies to identify breaches and security risks, many organizations remain threatened by some very common frustrations that remain inherent in the handling of video imaging.
Some of these frustrations include cameras being misaligned or directed in the wrong direction, producing fuzzy image at the bottom of the video, disconnecting equipment from the camera, or simply equipment not working properly. This can be due to any criminal act of an intruder, a disgruntled employee or simply an accident. In any of these events, when CCTV cameras do not work or DVRs
they are not recording, your security system and procedures are being compromised, and as a business itself, you no longer have any kind of video surveillance or documentation to protect yourself.
The above problems become more complicated as CCTV implementations are not heterogeneous. Therefore, an environment can include cameras from different manufacturers in the same place. For larger organizations, this becomes paramount, as you can have many heterogeneous brands of cameras and DVRs and from different manufacturers. All these various components will respond to alarms unevenly, even within the same
Manufacturer, different versions of the same brand of DVR may record and alert differently.
Security & Marketing
The market needs a unified platform where all CCTV sensors can be managed centrally and activity reports and alarms can be sent to the appropriate staff within the organization.
Significant and vital from security footage, this would help turn security cameras into marketing and sales sensors in order to collect vital statistics such as foot traffic in retail warehouses or the average wait time of customers in bank lines.
As a way to address many of these concerns, new business intelligence technologies are being introduced into the security market. Avocado Security, developer of the Global Business Intelligence and Security Optimization Platform, is an example. The company's technologies can actually integrate an organization's security sensors, including cameras and CCTV devices, so that
operate together to ensure business continuity and maximum operation of the security equipment.
Therefore, if a misaligned, disconnected or malfunctioning equipment is currently present, this technology can instantly send alerts related to the malfunction, so that adjustments can be made almost immediately for the security system. {mospagebreak}
"Video surveillance footage may not be available when it is really needed, due to the fact that cameras or DVRs have stopped recording well before an incident takes place," said Kevin Shahbazi, president of Avocado Security. "The optimization platform immediately alerts to such serious security flaws so that modifications can be made without significant delays."
Likewise, there is an intelligent form with security images, through the taking of video images from surveillance cameras and their respective transformation into intelligent, usable and commercial data and statistics. Video images can actually be taken from an existing security team coming from a vendor, or that is part of a heterogeneous multi-vendor environment, and translated into meaningful graphs and diagrams and even relevant marketing and sales information.
So, nowadays instead of security personnel just looking at "dumb data" from different images on video monitors, they can actually have a solution that gives them "smart data" about those images, so that actionable, real-time security decisions can be made.
"By using customers' existing systems, the platform can discover, detect, analyze, audit and convert images into usable business and security information," Shahbazi said. "Operational safety data, along with other types of security information, is brought into the system and then the accumulated data is normalized and compiled to be used by different departments in the form of actionable business intelligence so that effective security results can be obtained."
This new technology introduces innovative security and productivity measures for customers who want to improve security, operation and IT infrastructure.
