AST Digital Magazine April 2017 April 2017 | Page 62

Volume 11
and enables insight. Courtesy of Quantum Corporation and
YouTube)
That’s a significant jump from 2015 when the
market topped out at $178 billion. Their predic-
tions estimated that Infrastructure-as-a-Service
(IaaS) would grow by 42.8% while Software-as-
a-Service (SaaS) would grow at 21.7%.
What role should cloud storage play in your sur-
veillance infrastructure? Ultimately, the answer
comes down to your overall storage strategy, and
your desired balance of capacity, performance,
accessibility and cost.
Changes in surveillance technology are forcing
law enforcement agencies and municipalities to
address an influx of data.
April 2017 Edition
From a law enforcement perspective, consider a
body camera deployment.
One officer wearing a body camera and record-
ing video for four hours a day for a full year will
generate over one terabyte of video.
If you had 1,000 officers doing that in your de-
partment, they would collectively generate over
one petabyte of video in a year.
Cloud storage is an option to consider.
Prices vary depending on the provider and length
of contract, but most offer a low price-per-giga-
byte rate to store data.
However, you must also take into account other
factors and charges.
Here’s a simple example:
On average, a 1080p camera generates 10 GB
of video per day.
If you had a 50 camera installation and were re-
quired to retain the video for one year, you would
need 183 terabytes of storage capacity.
In a city surveillance scenario, the camera count
can go up by the thousands (or tens of thou-
sands), depending on the size of the deploy-
ment, which drives the storage capacity require-
ment much higher.
Typical cloud pricing models include separate
charges for activities such as data movement
operations, file access/retrieval, deletion, and
support.
Contracts can be complicated, and costs can
add up quickly.
For example, the City of Baltimore conducted an
analysis of cloud storage costs to support a pro-
posed body camera program. After factoring in
all the costs, their analysis revealed an average
one-year cost of the cloud solution to be $1.3M,
62