Report: 91 Percent of Surveillance is IT-Managed
As if you needed another reason to respect your IT department, new research by Axis Communications has found that 91 percent of organizations using video surveillance technology rely on IT to manage or support their deployments. And nearly half of the IT professionals surveyed said that their department is the most responsible for setting the organization’s surveillance strategy and making final infrastructure purchasing decisions.
As if you needed another reason to respect your IT department, new research by Axis Communications has found that 91 percent of organizations using video surveillance technology rely on IT to manage or support their deployments. And nearly half of the IT professionals surveyed said their department is the most responsible for setting the organization’s surveillance strategy and making final infrastructure purchasing decisions.
Axis collaborated with IT market research firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) on the recently released 2013 IT and Video Surveillance Market Study, which found that IT professionals increasingly are integral to North American company surveillance. The study found that the number of IT professionals working closely with video surveillance has grown tremendously in the past three years, up from 52 percent in 2011.
The drastic jump in IT involvement in video surveillance is also indicative of the rise in popularity of IP video systems, according to ESG Senior Principal Analyst Jon Oltsik. “Given the inevitable shift from outdated analog CCTV to superior IP video systems, a number of technical factors, such as network infrastructure requirements, bandwidth usage and data storage consumption, are moving surveillance decisions beyond the realm of physical security and directly impacting IT,” Oltsik noted in the report. “The ESG research indicates those IT departments that include surveillance requirements in their IT strategy and leverage video for business process improvement tend to maximize the benefits of surveillance investments while reducing unnecessary operations overhead.”
In addition to IT professionals manning surveillance equipment more frequently, the study also found more companies look to their IT managers when it comes to purchasing and installing these systems. According to the study, 47 percent of respondents said their department is the group most responsible for setting surveillance strategy and making final infrastructure purchasing decisions.
“We’ve seen much more IT involvement as the industry shifts to IP video, but ESG’s research was even higher than anticipated,” said Fredrik Nilsson, general manager of Axis Communications, in a prepared statement. “IT’s influence can positively affect network design, storage and business intelligence best practices, and the research points to opportunities for integrators to work together with their IT and physical security contacts to overcome the challenges of IP video with proper system configuration and expectation setting.”
And IT professionals not only are managing their organizations’ surveillance systems, they also are introducing new ways for companies to protect against theft, increase operational efficiencies and identify traffic patterns. Of the IT professionals surveyed, 80 percent use surveillance for business intelligence, which includes identifying efficiency problems, increasing employee training and controlling inventory. And 88 percent of these IT pros said that business intelligence is one of the main factors they use to justify new video technology and infrastructure purposes, with more and more companies utilizing large amounts of storage for their surveillance systems.
