Using the Cloud in Security
The cloud is a central facet to today’s cybersecurity discourse, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not relevant to the more traditional—i.e., physical—security environment either.
In fact, the cloud is increasingly playing a vital role in powering modern physical security efforts, especially in the commercial and business security space. In this post, we will discuss how the cloud is affecting two foundational domains of physical security.
Video Surveillance
In terms of video surveillance, the cloud is affecting the space in three ways:
- disaster recovery;
- scaling capacity to burgeoning data needs;
- and integrating new technologies, especially video analytics.
Though video storage might seem trivial to a family-owned restaurant, a large retailer with many different locations and, in turn, hundreds (if not thousands) of individual camera units will collect terabytes worth of data in a short period of time.
To host it, the retailer would have to become an effective data hosting company itself, which is well out of its scope and capacity. So by storing that data in the cloud, it frees itself from buying, maintaining, and expanding a data center—instead, it just pays a flat-rate OPEX fee.
In that vein, should a disaster hit, the retailer can leverage the cloud to restore its archives as the task of maintaining redundant copies of the data is the job of the cloud service provider (i.e., via multiple data centers). In effect, the retailer can focus on its core strengths—selling goods.
Finally, the cloud enables businesses to use new technologies, such as video analytics, with their video surveillance systems. They can ‘train’ their surveillance systems to conduct facial recognition, read license plate numbers, pick-up abnormal activity, etc.
Access Control
Like end-user identity management, having to manage the keycodes or biometric password data of hundreds—or thousands—of employees is not easy.
However, with the cloud (and physical security-based identity management systems), one’s business can rapidly provision and deprovision keycodes and access to specific locations in minutes, instead of days or hours.
In addition, you can see logs of who entered a specific site and when, enabling you to more effectively conduct an audit or forensics situation. Finally, the data to drive all of this is in the cloud, so in case of a disaster, you can promptly recover it.
Overall, though the cloud has its benefits, leveraging it in a physical security context requires expertise in many areas. Not only can a mistake in the process result in overspending, but it may leave gaps in your physical or cyber domains, or both.
Thus, you should start by calling a professional security company with experience in these areas, such as Logixx Security.