CxO of the Week: Sandesh Kaup, Country Manager, Milestone System, India & SAARC

Smart city initiatives in India are primarily aiming to intelligently use data and technology to make everyday life easier and better for the residents – while making innovative and efficient use of resources. Here, public safety plays an important role. Thus, video surveillance becomes key to have real-time alerts. It should also provide a thorough analysis of data to inform the responders regarding accidents, crimes and public safety situations. Sandesh Kaup, Country Manager, Milestone System, India & SAARC elaborates more on cloud adoption in video management systems and how Cloud can be safer and more cost-effective in the deployment of large scale projects.

Excerpts from the interaction:

What is the future of Public Video Security in India?

The future of public video security in India is tech-oriented. The government is already working on building 100 smart cities across the country, in which security will be an important aspect. India has always been a key market for video technology. Now, it is already accelerating the development of AI technologies. India shares great enthusiasm for IoT-based technologies - a fundamental pillar in the smart city infrastructure.

Video-based security systems, which were predominantly CCTV-based are now getting upgraded to IP (internet protocol)-based video management systems. The migration to the cloud and hybrid infrastructure is also in full throttle. Organizations are now better aware of different computing and storage options. They also now have more choices of infrastructure to choose from for their security system preferences.

Are we looking at public cloud adoption to become cost-effective and cyber-secure?

Cloud adoption is already in acceleration. Further, since 2020 it has now become more mainstream. Gartner estimates that the cloud will take 14.2% of the total global enterprise IT spending market in 2024; up from 9.1% in 2020. With the demand for cloud computing rising, and with different providers bringing more customized solutions for different needs to choose from, there is a good chance that these services will also come at highly competitive prices.

With regards to security, some may still try to reason that systems on-premises are most secure. Mostly, because your data stays within an organization and behind the company firewall. Others claim that leading public clouds are just as secure, if not more secure, than on-premises infrastructure.

Public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) gives several support and security tools for data protection. They follow a shared responsibility model, meaning the cloud provider, in this case, AWS will shoulder greater responsibility for cloud security, and the consumer will be responsible for some elements of that security. In many cases, the cloud can comparatively expedite the implementation of controls, such as encryption and auditing, with minimal impact on business processes than traditional on-premises infrastructure.

Tell us about your work in the Smart City Projects and the way forward.

We understand that smart cities need more than camera installations but smart videos integrating with new-age technology. In India, we are working with the government on India’s Smart and Safe City projects. We are also present in the security infrastructure of major transportation hubs in the country. The technologies on our platform transform hundreds or even thousands of security cameras deployed across the city into smart video devices. Thus, it contributes to the city's ability to improve security, safety, and incident response time.

In the coming years, we are looking forward to building not just better, but more secure infrastructures that will go beyond general security to include improve the environment or social welfare and general way of life. This, along with the advantage of a brand-agnostic open platform, like ours, scaling of security infrastructure becomes easier. RoI is also rapidly increasing due to IoT and integrated services, which continue to drive growth in the IP space.

What are your data storage strategies for large scale setups like entire cities?

Video technologies and analytical tools are rapidly evolving. AI and machine learning-based tools can now trigger actions based on events, patterns, and predictive analytics. Data storage plays a new and vital role in these systems. With numerous cameras collecting high-res video in 1080 or 4K formats, these technologies generate massive data sets. Depending on the industry and regulations, the retention time for this data could vary from months to years, or perhaps even indefinitely.

The data also needs to be readily available, possibly in real-time, to facilitate analysis with machine learning/deep learning algorithms. Also, the storage infrastructure needs to facilitate searching, so users can quickly retrieve specific clips for review. Of course, we need to achieve all of this within the constraints of tight operating budgets. At Milestone, we offer simple, seamless data management across on-premises and public cloud storage to further optimize investment costs. The solutions on our platform consolidate disparate storage silos to a single petabyte-scalable storage platform to meet retention time requirements, reduce technical complexity and performance bottlenecks.

The growing importance of data also gives rise to the concern of cybersecurity. So, at Milestone, we ensure that the security and integrity of our installed platforms remain a top priority. We minimize our customers’ exposure to risk by ensuring our software and hardware is secure by design, secure by default and secure by deployment. If a vulnerability flaw is detected, we provide mitigations and/or software updates as soon as possible with security fixes to customers and partners free of charge if the product is still supported.