Today’s businesses produce a lot of data and the trend is to produce more.  With video (and in some cases, audio) coming into the picture there is a lot more data.  Collecting it all can be expensive.  Making sense of it all is a problem.  There is valuable information hidden within this massive sea of data, but how do you find it?

Imagine a retail chain with 1,000 locations, each with 6 cameras recording.  Assuming 16 hours a day of operations, that’s 96 hours of video a day.  Even the best video compression out there results in at least gigabytes of video every day from each location adding up to terabytes per day for this particular customer.

Aggregating all that video to one location is prohibitively expensive, requiring lots of bandwidth and giant, expensive storage networks.  If one can store all the video at the “edge” (on site) but still keep all the advantages of having a single user interface to access the video then aggregation isn’t necessary.  This allows the use of commodity bandwidth (broadband) and commodity hardware solutions (off the shelf disk storage) to keep costs low.

So, we can keep the equipment and network costs low but how do you still deliver managed video as a service with all the data distributed across the ‘net?  Cost is very important, but it has to easy to use and it has to work.  No one has time to log into 1,000 different locations looking at all their locations in case they might find something interesting.  No one has time to check all their locations just to make sure video recording is working.  No one wants to add the cost of having to maintain yet another computer system at every remote location.

So how do you access the data without having to configure special rules on all the firewalls at your remote locations?  Out of this sea of video, which video is important?  How does one easily find that video.  With all that equipment lying around, how do you know it’s all working?

I’ll be proposing ways to address these issues in future articles.  If you have any questions or problems to add in that need to be resolved, please comment!