Surveillance is more than just installing security cameras: Rajesh Khurana, Seagate Technology

How do you see the development in the Indian surveillance market?

The government’s focus on smart cities and the rising need for better security are the prime motivators driving the growth of the video surveillance market in India. In addition; the rapidly improving IT infrastructure, increased IT spending, as well as the surging need for video analytics and remote monitoring show that organizations are starting to pay more attention to their video surveillance needs.

In fact, in a global survey Seagate conducted recently, (Seagate Video Surveillance Trend Report), it was found that 85% of nearly 1,100 system integrators and enterprise IT executives across a wide range of industries said that one of the key reasons driving video surveillance is safety and security. The need to optimize work flows (53%) and regulatory compliance (48%) were also named as the main drivers for using video surveillance.

Which sectors are investing more in the surveillance industry?

The government departments are one of the major sectors investing in surveillance industry. To ensure safety and security of the public, the Indian government has set up surveillance cameras at railway stations, housing estates, traffic signals, and other public places. Recently, India is also witnessing a surge in the use of video surveillance in sectors like banking and financial, hospitality, transportation, education, and retail.

Through installing video cameras, the fundamental goals that the enterprises in these sectors have are to ensure people’s safety and minimization of theft and fraudulent activities. For the banking and financial sector, there are certain regulations for them to have surveillance systems and keep the footage for a few years. Hospitality sector is using video surveillance to cater to their customers' security better and to monitor and improve daily operations. Retail sectors uses video surveillance for identifying the customers’ shopping habits and browsing time, understanding their needs and preferences to determine how best to arrange the products that can help drive sales and retain the customers.

What are the applications of video surveillance and data created by video surveillance?

According to Seagate’s Video Surveillance Trend Report, the top-most application of video surveillance is to ensure safety and security in organizations. The other applications are for reducing loss and theft, vandalism prevention, monitoring employee activity, optimizing work flows, protection from litigation, harassment prevention, regulatory compliance, and employee training.

In the same report, organizations in India typically use an average of 249 cameras for the execution of the above mentioned applications. All these applications of video surveillance create a lot of data which needs to be stored for future analysis and monitoring.

How do you see the market in the future?

Video surveillance will play a significant role in the future, given that the Indian government’s plan is to build hundred smart cities by 2020. To go about this, the government has to lay the necessary security groundwork for citizens’ peace of mind which will ultimately encourage a city’s transformation into a smart city as well as build the surveillance infrastructure for video analysis to adjust and improve the transportation efficiency.

Whether it is for better security, efficiency or for more revenue generation, an increasing number of companies and consumers are migrating to high-definition digital video solutions and more active cameras. All these factors will lead to data explosion and in turn will drive demand for better storage solutions.

What are the features and benefits of Seagate Surveillance solutions?

Seagate has been in the surveillance segment for more than 10 years. As the first hard drive manufacturer to develop a surveillance-focused drive, we have been and are helping customers match need with function, while offering scalable solutions as their businesses grow.

We recently launched the world’s first 8TB Surveillance HDD, the largest drive of its kind for surveillance applications in the industry. This high capacity surveillance drive is built to meet the growing storage and access needs of SMBs and large enterprises. The Surveillance HDD 8TB can serve as a critical component to ensure successful, scalable and reliable solutions so business leaders can focus on other priorities knowing they have the coverage they need. Engineered to run 24x7, the 3.5-inch drive can store over 800 hours of high-definition (HD) content captured by up to 64 cameras simultaneously recording HD content.

Our Surveillance HDD has a one million hour MTBF (mean time between failure), allowing it to be kept in the field longer while reducing the cost of field deployment. For cloud and traditional enterprise markets, Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD can address their needs for higher capacity and extremely reliable data storage solutions. It has up to 2 mn hours MTBF, making it ideal for a high density file-storage system. These specialized surveillance drives from Seagate ensures better streaming performance and reliability in surveillance environments.