Demand for offsite video storage to soar as adoption of body-worn surveillance increases

    Nov. 30, 2015
    IHS forecasts storage to generate a higher portion of market revenues than hardware in 2019

    Source SecurityInfoWatch.com

    (Graphic courtesy IHS)
    While hardware was estimated to account for approximately 55 percent of the $60 million global market for body-worn video surveillance equipment and service in law enforcement in 2014, demand for storage is expected to outpace hardware over the next several years and will generate more than 50 percent of the market’s revenue in 2019.
    While hardware was estimated to account for approximately 55 percent of the $60 million global market for body-worn video surveillance equipment and service in law enforcement in 2014, demand for storage is expected to outpace hardware over the next several years and will generate more than 50 percent of the market’s revenue in 2019.

    With the proliferation of body-worn video surveillance equipment within law enforcement agencies in recent years, a new report from market research firm IHS forecasts that the demand for video storage solutions, especially offsite cloud offerings, will grow exponentially in the years to come.

    While hardware was estimated to account for approximately 55 percent of the $60 million global market for body-worn video surveillance equipment and service in law enforcement in 2014, demand for storage is expected to outpace hardware over the next several years and will generate more than 50 percent of the market’s revenue in 2019.

    And although there are two primary methods for storage and data management of video; local (on-site storage on a physical server owned, controlled and maintained by the specific police force), and third-party (off-site “cloud” storage and management through an external datacenter such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure), IHS predicts that third-party solutions will eventually win the day.

    “Third party storage will become more commonly used over the next five years to store body-worn video surveillance. This is because it is more economical and scalable with the expected growth of data storage requirements,” Oliver Philippou, senior analyst for video surveillance and security services at IHS, said in a statement.

    There have been security concerns raised over the storage of evidence and personal data on non-police servers; however, Philippou said third-party solutions are considered to offer the best security. Third party datacenters store data in farmed server arrays, fragmented and spread across several servers, whereas with local storage data is generally stored in rack servers, where complete data sets are all in one place. Both local and third parties encrypt data, however, third-party solutions are considered to offer better penetration resilience.

    While IHS expects third party storage of data from body-worn cameras to become the majority portion of this market, and that overall third party storage offers the most future proof, scalable, and flexible option, the research firm said it does not believe that third party is best for every police force, and in many situations local storage will offer the best solution. Data storage and management needs to be altered to police forces specific needs. 

    Click here for more information about the report.