There are many new technologies arriving at ISC West 2017, plus hundreds of product upgrades.
Every vendor will want your attention, and buzzwords will be flying fast and furious to assault eyes and ears. Amidst all the flurry, breakthrough technologies will be arriving at this show, and some of them are likely to be of great value to you. Yet it will be harder than ever to zero in on them.
That’s why some new thinking is required for this year’s show floor.
Mobile, cloud, analytics and IoT will be a strong focus both for vendors and educational sessions. It is natural for vendors to be excited about their product improvements and innovations. They have no trouble talking about the technical nuts and bolts. Their weak point is in understanding how these technical bits will improve your security effectiveness or cost effectiveness. How will your security operations benefit?
This is hard for vendors as no two customers have identical situations.
Technology Perspectives Can Help
Here are several perspectives that can help you and help vendors focus on what matters to you.
Force-Multiplier Effects. A force multiplier is a product or system capability that lets your existing security force, whether an army of one, a small staff, or a good-sized team do the work of a much larger staff. At what kinds of work do you or your staff spend the most time? In one security department, two staff spent between 10 and 20 hours each per week searching through video.
A video synopsis tool that simultaneously presents events and activities that occurred at different times, reduced their video search work to just 2 to 3 hours each per week. They both permanently gained almost half of their work-week back—eliminating the need to hire a new person. Video synopsis capability is now available for many more video systems than it used to be.
Existing System Extension. Are there new technologies, or new capabilities, that let you get more out of your existing security systems deployment? What can you add to your system that will make it more useful, such as by speeding incident response, investigations, or by eliminating current facility vulnerabilities?
Breakthrough Technology. New generation video analytics, by which I mean brand-new analytics technology that includes machine learning, auto-configuration, and is based upon building a digital model against which multiple analytics can be run. This kind of technology allows a single video server, that formerly could only process 16 video streams at a time, to now process up to 200 analytics without having to upgrade the server’s processor or memory. This is an example of what the term “breakthrough technology” means. New generation video analytics provides both a force-multiplier and system extension effects.
These three perspectives can help you zero in on technology capabilities that will be of the most benefit to you.
Follow-up Article
Watch for next week’s article: Six Questions to Ask Vendors at ISC West 2017.
About the Author:
Ray Bernard, PSP CHS-III, is the principal consultant for Ray Bernard Consulting Services (RBCS), a firm that provides security consulting services for public and private facilities (www.go-rbcs.com). Mr. Bernard is a Subject Matter Expert Faculty of the Security Executive Council and an active member of the ASIS International member councils for Physical Security and IT Security.
