Securing the security cameras
CCTV was a big business, but it is now making way for the digital age. However, despite boasting an image quality superior to that of analogue devices, does IP surveillance still have drawbacks? Nick Booth investigates in the first of our three-part series
You can do so many marvellous things these days with digital cameras, it’s a wonder anybody bothers with analogue hardware any more. Why would you want to spend hours wading through old video tapes, to find the exact moment when Suspect A secretes Exhibit B on their person, when you could find the same evidence, with an infinitely higher quality image, in seconds, if everything was stored digitally?
One successful prosecution and you will have made your money back on the original investment.
“There are the three main components of an IP-based video surveillance system,” says Simon Harris, analyst at IMS Research. “IP cameras, management software and codecs. Users will also need a PC to run the software on, networking components, such as routers and cabling, so there are pull-through opportunities for VARs.”
The quality of digital cameras, the manageability of the storage material, and the ‘interrogate-ability’ of the databases on which these digital images reside, make them infinitely superior to old-fashioned CCTV. You would think that there would be hardly any traditional CCTV kit left in the country, unless it was being exhibited at the Science Museum or lying in a skip.
And yet the penetration of digital surveillance equipment is tiny. As a nation, we may have more surveillance cameras pointed at every face in the country than anywhere else in the world. Still, civil libertarians can console themselves that at least these systems aren’t efficient.
The key here is that digital cameras, attached to IP networks, are open. And openness doesn’t generally fit in with the secretive, spying culture of CCTV. You shouldn’t have a CCTV system if it runs on technology that anybody can access. It seems cameras aren’t about raising general awareness. Instead they give certain individuals, usually the security professionals, licence to spy on everybody else in the country.
This is partly why the penetration of network cameras is tiny. Axis has been in this business for 20 years and launched the first IP-based security camera in the UK market as long ago as 1996. Any resistance to adopting digital technology might be based on three common fears among the type of people who are attracted to security jobs.
First, there is the fear that the ‘open’ nature of digital technology could lead to an increased exposure to the risks of hacking.
“Just look what happened when computers were networked together,” the argument goes. “Nobody warned us about the armies of hackers, crackers, virus writers and all the other denial-of-service attackers who would want to storm the ramparts and pillage our assets. Why should we allow security cameras to be hijacked in the same way?”
Second, there is a shortage of people out there who could be trusted to install these digital systems. Granted, there is no shortage of IT resellers who could install a network camera in two minutes, assign it an IP address and integrate it into the network in another five. But what do IT experts know about the aesthetics of security? How many networking resellers are au fait with the CCTV code of practise? How many of them know how the Data Protection Act affects these installations? They might know how to fix a camera to a wall, but how many actually know where it should go, and why? It takes years to gather that sort of experience.
That sort of experience is available, from traditional CCTV camera vendors, at a fraction of the price. Of course, they know nothing about digital cameras, and have probably never even heard of internet protocol, but that is a compromise many buyers are happy to make.
The third, and arguably the biggest fear among security buyers, is that digital technology will let the light in on their little secret circle. Once the mystique is taken out of surveillance, the game will be up for them.
Clearly there is a big challenge in winning traditional security buyers over to IP surveillance, but that is one the IT industry should relish. If this particular aspect of convergence follows in the footsteps of similar clashes, such as those between telephony and IT, and printing and photocopying, then the digital technology experts should come out on top. Dominic Bruning, marketing director at Axis, is ready for the task.
“Network cameras make up only 10 per cent of the market at the moment, but that proportion is growing really quickly,” he says. “There are two broad camps of reseller out there, but neither of them has the full range of skills. Our job is to complete their knowledge.”
There are several ways to complete the knowledge of security and networking resellers. They could either be match-made, so that the security nous of the traditional camera installers could be married to the networking know-how of the datacoms reseller. These partnerships do exist, but they tend to be very uneven. Networking resellers charge far more than traditional camera security consultants. Therfore, they are more likely to just contract out, for example, the camera installation process, and own the rest of the project.
“Some companies buy in skills, but there aren’t really that many joint efforts or mergers,” Bruning says. Instead, the 300 resellers in Axis’ three-tier channel can choose a range of courses designed to help fill in their knowledge gap. The traditional camera installers, for example, are likely to need to learn about network design and configuration, storage management, bandwidth optimisation and creating a secure IP infrastructure. On the other hand, the IT crowd will need to be more convincing on subjects such as camera resolution, image quality and producing forensic standard pictures.
The general consensus is that IP surveillance is going to boom. Once people are satisfied that the data traffic from cameras can be kept under control, and won’t eat up the company network’s bandwidth, then most people will be happy to allow them to proliferate. Everyone knows it is possible to ring-fence bandwidth for the really important applications these days, so that way surveillance cameras will not have much impact on the network. Since they also make a much smaller dent in the company budget than other IT projects, they are set to become increasingly popular.
This should open up new opportunities for resellers that wish to sell surveillance as just another application that can run on the corporate network. Petards, for example, is a security vendor that includes, among its broad range of offerings, specialist covert cameras. But hidden camera work is not what excites Petards’s partner sales manager Eleanor Johnson. “Covert cameras are a niche. The really exciting prospect would be to help Cisco resellers do more for their clients,” she says.
Many end-users would be happy to be get more use out of their expensive Cisco IP phones. Petard has an application that can do this. Using Petard’s software, a Cisco-powered VPN could be used to carry digital video images.
“Clients could use their IP phones to watch video content, as they were designed for that purpose, but not many get the full usage out of them,” Johnson says. “And it would be a great way of helping Cisco resellers to sell more call-manager related services.”
There are more groovy applications than that, according to Jack Savas, marketing manager at CatEyeUK, a division of WirelessUK, itself a specialist in digital CCTV remote video-monitoring and surveillance solutions over the TCP/IP network. The basic concept of its service, RemoteCCTV.net, is that if motion is detected in view of the fitted camera, snapshots are taken and the images are uploaded into the user’s dedicated FTP account. It is all relayed using FTP software from Ipswich.
“This isn’t something you can just buy off the shelf, because every customer is different,” Savas says. “In other words, it’s a long way from becoming a plug-and-play, low-margin commodity, which is happening in some other areas of the camera market [such as videoconferencing and webcams].”
However, integration might offer a more realistic market opportunity for resellers. Ken Sutherland, surveillance director at TSS, says the old closed-circuit systems need to be opened up to new methods of analysis. This is done not by chucking out the old analogue kit, but by converting the images to digital format. This means they can be stored digitally, and are subject to the same computer analysis.
“Other systems can also be interfaced to the CCTV network,” Sutherland says. “These include access control, perimeter alarms and fire-detection systems. If all of this is done on a single digital IP network, the integration is much easier.”
Indeed, this is one of the central components of Axis’s market strategy. “Converters, which sit by a camera and convert the nature of the footage, are going to be a great source of growth in this market,” Bruning claims. “Once you assign a converter to a camera, you can give it an IP address.”
Once that has been achieved, then it is just a short step to assimilating the traditional closed circuit systems into the all encompassing IT network.
Looking further into the future, as these cameras become more intelligent at analysing behaviour and acting on it, what can we expect? Can we use machines to identify unusual behaviour, automatically take a picture, call the police and pepper spray the suspect?
“All of these things are possible, but the technology available today is not 100 per cent accurate, so these systems are still likely to produce a lot of false alarms,” Sutherland says. “At present these systems should be seen as an aid to a human operator, rather than as a replacement.”
A more pragmatic view of the future of security is offered by the world expert on networked surveillance, Sarb Sembhi, head of security practise at end-user Etheios.
“The one thing we can be sure about is that IP surveillance networks will have all of the vulnerabilities that other data networks have,” he says. Wireless networks are already there to be abused.
“A policeman friend went to the City [of London] recently, to carry out some video surveillance on a suspect. But he kept picking up signals from a nearby bank and watching its private video footage of its vaults,” he adds.
Sembhi already makes a good living travelling the country, warning people of the dangers of unsecured IP surveillance, and how to plug the gaps. This could be where the money is in the future.
Meanwhile, in September, Sembhi will be travelling around the City, with his portable surveillance equipment, logging all of the IP-enabled security camera vulnerabilities that he can find.
So it would appear that security will be big. But securing the security cameras will be even bigger.
CONTACTS:
Axis (0870) 162 0047
Cateye (020) 7511 3939
Etheios (020) 8570 0616
IMS Research (01933) 402 255
Petards (01932) 788 288
Telindus Surveillance Solutions (01223) 509 300