Video Cloud IoT Based Service

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The Security Industry Association (SIA) has identified and announced the 2019 Security Megatrends – the foundation of SIA’s signature yearly report defining the major trends and forces at play in the global security industry.  The identification of these trends is based on survey data generated in September and October 2018 from top security industry business leaders.  The 2019 Security Megatrends from SIA are:

  1. Cybersecurity Impact on Physical Security
  2. Internet of Things (IoT) and the Big Data Effect
  3. Cloud Computing
  4. Workforce Development
  5. AI
  6. Emphasis on Data Privacy
  7. Move to Service Models
  8. Security Integrated in Smart Environments
  9. Advanced Digital Identities
  10. Impact of Consumer Electronics Companies

In their release of these trends, SIA Chairman of the Board Scott Schafer says “Today, modern physical security solutions are comprised of IoT devices and sensors that generate high volumes of security data. Applying analytics and artificial intelligence systems makes this data more actionable and increases responsiveness for security systems users.  Cybersecurity continues to be at the top of the list of the most important trends identified by security industry manufacturers, systems integrators, security practitioners, architects and engineers, and SIA will continue to address this trend over the next year and in the foreseeable future.”

We wanted to get an independent observer’s view of these trends so we turned to an emerging security industry thought leader, Andreas Pettersson, CEO of Arcules for his insights.  Arcules’ stated purpose is “To achieve our mission of transforming video into powerful intelligence we offer video cloud IoT solutions. Aggregating video and IoT data using the latest AI and cloud technologies, Arcules creates solutions for the enterprise segment that help companies optimize their business and make the world a safer place.”

Arcules is a promising new company on the security scene so we have followed them closely for the last year, meeting with them, interviewing their CEO, and receiving a demonstration of their solution.  Andreas told us in late October 2018, “Arcules was launched a little bit more than a year ago.  As of the 1st of October, 2018 we have a Video Cloud IoT based Service out in the market.  When we started in August of 2017 we were a handful of people.  We are close to 70 people, right now.”  Arcules is a Canon group (NYSE: CAJ) company powered by technology from Milestone Systems, the global industry leader in video management software.

As with other emerging security firms we have interviewed and written about, Arcules is the beneficiary of conceiving of and developing their physical security solution in a time of heightened cybersecurity awareness and technology.  Unlike legacy physical security solutions that have found it necessary to adapt their solutions to new and ever-evolving cybersecurity threats, today’s new physical security solutions were born into a world that requires a cutting-edge understanding of the entire business threatscape.

As we began a recent discussion with Andreas about the SIA 2019 Security Megatrends his first comment was that it is remarkable that each of these trends describes what Arcules saw, from the onset, as critical components of the solution they wanted to bring to market.

Andreas believes that, from a cybersecurity perspective, the public cloud is more secure than a private data center or even an on-prem solution.  They chose Google Cloud as their cloud infrastructure for that very reason.  He said, “One of the reasons we chose Google Cloud was that when there is a cybersecurity breach, Google is among the first to identify and publish the new security threat and they often published just after they protect their own cloud. And that means that the services that we have built on top of their platform are always up to date.”

Watch as an Arcules engineer explains what they do, how they do it differently and presents their interface at the Google Cloud Next ’18 event.

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To help us understand how Arcules is addressing the SIA Megatrends, Andreas says, “We have built our own AI and ML video analytics as well as other types of IoT data analytics.  We are using GPUs and TPUs sitting in the cloud to be able to perform more computing on unstructured data.  In that way, our customers don’t need to invest in a lot of extra on-prem hardware.  They can use it as a service from us when needed.  They can pick and choose which cameras they want to run analytics on, then just turn it on.”

Andreas pointed out that an additional important trend, not listed in the SIA 2019 Security Megatrends because it may be more than a year away for many, is the use of 5G in the industry.  He believes that once 5G is widely available it will be less expensive for many customers to put an antenna on their building than it will be to pull fiber to their site.  This will allow them to easily and inexpensively offload their data into a cloud solution.  This will enable all of these other Megatrends to really take hold.  He said, “The bottleneck has been, for a long time, the ability to get all that surveillance data into a cloud where you can make sense of it.  Unless you already have a good internet uplink, you might not be able to do all that’s possible with your data today.  5G will enable even more companies to take advantage of these new technologies.  Largely the reason the Megatrends list looks the way it does is that people have started to realize the value in getting their data into the cloud.”
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Today’s technologies enable us to gather enormous amounts of data.  The question then becomes, what do we do with this data?  Often the answer is more about business optimization that strictly security.  Once you have access to this data and solutions that can help you analyze it, the business use cases are astronomical.  It’s an exciting time to be a part of the security industry.  Watch these trends closely because they are likely to change the face of security in dramatic ways.

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By: Steven Bowcut, CPP, PSP, Brilliance Security Magazine Editor-in-Chief