Security Trends for 2017

The rise of a depressed economy particularly in South Africa has caused a significant amount of pressure on most manufacturing concerns. The reality that security gets pushed to the doldrums infiltrates most businesses as most folk place emphasis on more pressing matters ie. Paying salaries and keeping a businesses’ proverbial lights one. 

That being said, the security industry has an incredible way of re-inventing itself. Making its product more accessible to end-users and ultimately fulfilling the goal of protecting , not only the staff, that frequent the respective businesses but also safe guarding the equity that makes the business function. 

With the advent of Megapixel technology it has become evident that the ‘camera footprint’ is in ever danger of decreasing. Not only is this great news for our consumers but it does question our intention with design. From a Systems Integrator perspective are we actually after creating a monster amount of cameras or are we after minimizing and more importantly optimising these particular sites to assure client satisfaction? 

You might ask why on earth you would want to decrease camera counts – well in line with trend in business and the fact that most businesses are after efficiency’s, not only on operational infrastructure, but in environmental de-impact of their energy footprint it would become quite an obvious answer to the conundrum of having too many surveillance items on site. 

Thus the intention would be to use more ‘energy efficient’ or ‘smart’ devises to do what you traditionally want to do on site. 

The question bodes – how do you do this?

The answer is multi faceted, we as designers can get extremely lazy and stuck in a rut in the way that we have always done things, or we can invent a new approach to the problem by asking the correct questions and by utilising devices that are much smarter than our typical ones.  

The use of multi – directional cameras placed in one housing is an example of how to decrease counts of camera. Utilising high megapixel panoramic cameras is another. 

Most of my learned friends would argue bandwidth, they would argue space and they would argue cost. Surprisingly on all three counts the manufacturers in particular high MP CCTV manufacturers have come up with some interesting answers to our question. The invention of smart H.264 decreases a significant output of bandwidth to a minuscule amount, the ever enforcing driving down of price has made these products so affordable and more importantly the soft costs that so many businesses have and try to curtail are addressed with these cameras. Understanding pixel density and how to optimise a design is of crucial importance and this is all driving trend in 2017.