What the future holds for e-surveillance service?

With time, enterprise e-surveillance service has made enormous strides across industries in areas such as affordability and availability. When e-surveillance services were introduced at very first for enterprises to monitor commercial properties, they did not have good first impressions. The expensive equipment and complex installations were used to intimidate business owners. Therefore, they were unable to support the cost of installing a CCTV monitoring system and maintain it. Besides, there was a huge problem in storing this huge volume of video footage, businesses always had a fear of data leak with transportable storage devices.

“Technology plays a major role in enhancing security and surveillance capabilities by offering many increasingly technical solutions such as alarms, access control devices, and video surveillance.” – Statista

Now, with the advancement of technology; the surveillance game has changed. Overcoming the hurdles of the past, e-surveillance infrastructure is affordable for businesses and can be customized according to business needs. With 24×7 live remote monitoring and cloud storage facilities, providing a whole new dimension to security arrangements of commercial properties.

Current best practices of E-Surveillance

Keeping in mind the purpose of effective surveillance, businesses should aim to adhere to get the maximum return on investment that they’ve made in their e-surveillance service. Here are the three most significant e-surveillance best practices today.

Remote monitoring

E-surveillance makes it possible for enterprises to monitor activities outside and inside of the office premises at the same time; regardless of the geographical locations. The video feed can be viewed live from a unified central control as a one-view-monitoring. The operators sitting in the central control room can keep an eye on the business activities throughout, irrespective of the number of stores, sub-units, branches, etc. Having a remote video surveillance service in place allows businesses to provide instructions or issue notifications in real-time to the employees or guards in a different location, in case, of any suspicious actions, without being physically present at that location. It saves money on hiring, transport, and enables easy decentralized management. Simply, strategically installing CCTV cameras across all branches, warehouses, and retail stores can benefit to gain business insights. It not only safeguards your commercial property and employees but also becomes a catalyst in managing your business operations.

Around-the-clock live monitoring

Once you install e-surveillance at your office, you need to hire employees who can sincerely monitor the live video feed, 24×7. If you are compromising on the quality and consistency of live surveillance, you might get in trouble. Having a live monitoring team in place keeps a check on commercial properties around-the-clock. The team is generally equipped with skilled and trained experts monitoring the video feed in real-time, and around-the-clock. If they see some unexpected or suspicious actions, they immediately notify you on their smartphones and the crime can be prevented. Besides, if some glitch arises on the system and a live video feed is stopped, the live monitoring team will fix it in real-time and ensure that you get consistent and quality live video surveillance.

Cloud storage

CCTV cameras generate a huge volume of video data regularly. To save this data and store it securely for a long has been a struggle for non-cloud surveillance companies. The legacy storage monitoring solutions were limited with hard drives and every time the operators had to clear the data early to free up space for the following recorded video footage. With cloud storage monitoring, businesses can save more data. If your acquired storage space in the cloud is filling up but the video footage is crucial and you don’t want to erase it, in that case, the cloud storage solution shows its flexibility to get more space at a low cost. Cloud storage solutions are flexible enough to save all your essential video footage data and you can keep them as long as required. Any day, it is better than purchasing an extra costly hard-drive and having the fear of footage getting stolen or corrupted, in case, of traditional storage monitoring methods.

What the future holds for e-surveillance service?

The world has seen advancements in technology in all fields. The security surveillance industry is no different. The traditional surveillance systems were only able to record incidents and used to provide only fragmentary evidence after the crime had taken place. With time, businesses are opting for smart surveillance along with insights that empower them to introspect in business strategies as well.

So, what is the future of enterprise e-surveillance and what do businesses require? Let’s find out.

More than just surveillance

First and foremost, e-surveillance hugely contributes to security arrangements to safeguard your commercial property. But, it can be useful in different business aspects also. By leveraging AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning), businesses can apply video analytics to surveillance. Video analytics tools are proven to provide valuable business insights and allow companies to make more informed decisions. From analyzing customer behavior, buying patterns in retail stores to optimizing smart vehicle management in warehouses, enterprises will look to adapt video analytics tools. The applied video analytics on surveillance maximizes the ROI (return on investment) for businesses.

In the contemporary surveillance landscape, security should be the utmost priority. But, also there is an undeniable appetite for sophisticated, cost-effective, and user-friendly e-surveillance solutions. Progressive businesses will certainly look to leverage these advanced surveillance technologies to thrive among competitors.

The global video analytics market is expected to grow from USD 4.9 billion in 2020 to USD 11.7 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 19.0% during the forecast period. (Source)

Video analytics can detect abnormal actions, alert security guards, and stop the case from going any further. Businesses will integrate video analytics with the surveillance system to intercept and prevent crime, gaining real value from their e-surveillance services. Rather than just recording a crime taking place at their office premises.

Robust use of AI and ML in e-surveillance

False alarms are the declared nemesis of effective e-surveillance. In a live video monitoring setup, false alarms are the real headache for operators. Unnecessary alerts inevitably disturb the focus of security operators. False alarms make it difficult for operators to monitor the area disordering their attention and certainly wasting time. The application of AI and ML enables e-surveillance services to ‘learn’ what a possible threat may look like. For example, the machines can be trained to identify and differentiate between a person or vehicle or even a bird, etc. The technology will increase accuracy, indeed. It will allow driving more correct detection and as well as avoid alerts related to natural conditions like birds, wind, or animals. AI and ML will empower businesses to push efficiency in surveillance. It will eliminate wastage of time and resources, and provides a compact security setup.

Advanced post-event search

While responding to events in real-time, and stopping them when possible, is essential to drive strong security. But, e-surveillance is not only limited to that, investigating crimes retrospectively is also a crucial job. Today, most of the surveillance solutions are working with legacy methods and are not updated with superior post-event search aptitudes. Therefore, businesses struggle to find and review past incidents. No doubt, it hampers the crime investigation. For instance, finding and analyzing the crime suspect activity came to the office in a black vehicle, across 25 cameras on-site; or in case, of a missing patient in the hospital wearing a white dressing gown. Reviewing all 60 camera footage of the last five days is a real daunting task. Both the jobs are next to impossible with regular security cameras as the image search would not produce the required historic or active data. Thus, it is pivotal for businesses to have a more advanced post-event search tool to investigate crimes better.

By leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence into effect, security operators can easily search the huge volume of stored footage with more particular search criteria to generate actionable reports that help to catch the suspect or shed light on the incident. While crime takes place and real-time intervention is not possible, then, the post-event analysis is only crucial in terms of evidence. The future e-surveillance service will look to enhance enterprise security management capabilities in this area.