SAFR® from RealNetworks, Inc., the premier facial recognition platform for live video, recently shared its top predictions for the physical security industry in 2022. These include letting go of fears around AI, embracing hybrid cloud solutions and embracing pandemic-driven use cases. Better Conversations Around Artificial Intelligence (AI) Our current conversations about AI are frequently fear-based. Coverage in the media has been dominated by depictions of rampant bias and invasions of privacy. While these are legitimate concerns, allowing our fears to dictate the conversation runs the risk of keeping us from getting to the potential benefits. The trend for 2022 will be to move away from this fearmongering and towards more balanced perspectives and a greater understanding of the challenges and possibilities of this emerging technology. This does not mean taking a stance of false complacency where we accept AI as a panacea that will solve all our problems. On the contrary, engineers and product creators must continue to be vigilant about privacy and bias and create solutions that mitigate risk. When it comes to bias, for example, we must be wary of how it can infect AI models and how historical bias in a dataset’s ground truth can be amplified by an algorithm. SAFR is very active in this area and has recently funded a research program at the University of Washington to explore bias and develop policy recommendations. Moving Towards the Edge F or compute intensive computer vision applications, it has become increasingly clear that it is not feasible to perform this processing solely in the cloud. Uploading thousands of hours of raw video is a poor use of cloud resources and bandwidth. In contrast, processing raw pixels at the edge, before they are even compressed, is more accurate, efficient, and secure. Moving all business operations to the cloud can also create single points of failure that could be catastrophic for organizations. But the solution is not to abandon the cloud and move back to working on-premises. Instead, 2022 will see the creation of more hybrid solutions where a lot of processing is done at the edge, while the cloud remains responsible for coordination and orchestration of massively distributed computer vision applications. One of the advancements that is helping us move in this direction is that video cameras are getting smarter. In fact, they’re so smart that the entire SAFR stack can now be ported to System on a Chip (SoC) processors that power some of the world’s leading cameras. With a hybrid solution, events are coordinated in the cloud while video is processed at the edge. This is more scalable in terms of cost as organizations don’t have to pay to move data from the cameras to the cloud for processing and then back to the organization for review. This also increases data privacy since facial or biometric data doesn’t leave the camera or get sent across the network. And, because the analytics uses the raw pixels directly from the camera instead of pixels that have been compressed, encoded, and decoded, the results are also more accurate. Learning from Pandemic Use Cases While the COVID-19 pandemic is not over, we have certainly learned from our experience of helping organizations work to contain the virus and keep populations safe. In 2022, the security industry will focus on developing touchless security solutions to minimize our reliance on physical credentials and to replace communal surfaces like fingerprint scanning at airports. These touchless solutions will mitigate the spread of the virus by reducing in-person interactions as well as the number of surfaces people touch. A good example is a hotel using a touchless application for video analytics. Here, guests who are enrolled in the hotel’s VIP program are first recognized by video cameras in the hotel lobby as they enter. Once guests are identified, the system automatically pushes a notification to their phone that matches them to their reservation and provides them with their room number. This means guests don’t have to wait in line at the check-in desk or come into direct contact with hotel staff. Once at their room, guests can unlock their door by using either facial recognition or a QR code that has been sent to their phone as part of the automated check-in procedure.  

Genetec Inc., a leading technology provider of unified security, public safety, operations, and business intelligence solutions, recently shared its top predictions for the physical security industry in 2022. Monitoring occupancy and space utilization will remain a top priority Within months of the pandemic, businesses were deploying different solutions to track occupancy in their buildings and control social distancing. Almost two years later, this trend is still growing because they’re seeing value from the data collected. Beyond safety objectives, organizations will embrace the use of spatial analytics data to reduce wait times, optimize staff scheduling, and enhance business operations. As businesses give employees the flexibility to split up their work time between the office and home, organizations will be looking for ways to best optimize their workplaces. By using space utilization intelligence, they will be able to analyze employee office attendance, monitor meeting room demands, and make informed floorplan changes such as adding more desk-sharing options. Video analytics will become more viable for large-scale deployments In recent years, demand for video analytics solutions has been strong. As AI techniques such as machine learning and deep learning continue to bolster the power of analytics, more organizations are eager to invest. However, because complex video analytics still require very powerful servers for adequate data processing, deploying analytics at an enterprise level isn’t always practical. As we move into 2022, we believe video analytics applications will mature in ways that make them easier and more economical to deploy at scale. This evolution will be made possible by vendors who focus on hardware resource efficiency and offer more granular controls for running analytics at certain intervals or schedules, instead of continuously. Cybercrime will continue to grow and inspire new strategies A report by Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that global crime costs will reach $10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025. With a growth rate of 15% per year, this cost is said to represent the greatest transfer of economic wealth in history. As more devices come online and data processing becomes central to operations, businesses will need to remain agile and responsive to the evolving threat landscape. Their customers will also demand greater transparency about how they are keeping data secure and private. All of this will usher in an entirely new model for cybersecurity that relies on continuous verification rather than just hardening networks and systems. Building layers of protection into a security ecosystem won’t be enough. Decision-makers will need to implement more offensive cybersecurity strategies and choose partners who offer higher levels of automation to stay on top of potential threats. Supply chain risks will gain more focus and attention The supply chain issues that the world is currently experiencing will encourage businesses to be less dependent on single-source, proprietary solutions. Forward-thinking organizations will instead seek open architecture solutions that offer increased choice and flexibility based on requirements and current availability. But there’s more to supply chain issues than the current shortage of goods and materials. As cybercriminals become more sophisticated, organizations are under greater pressure to scrutinize the cybersecurity measures, standards, and certifications of their entire supply chain ecosystem. In a world where organizations no longer have clearly defined network perimeters, we anticipate seeing more businesses and government agencies broadening the scope of their cybersecurity policies to establish baseline security standards for the solutions they purchase and the vendors they partner with. More organizations will make the move to hybrid cloud As more businesses take a step towards trialing cloud applications, they’ll quickly understand the benefits of hybrid cloud, which will produce even greater forward momentum in the adoption of cloud technologies in the new year. This could include implementing a digital evidence management system to boost data privacy compliance, deploying a cloud video management system to secure a high-risk remote location, or installing a PIAM (physical identity access management) system to better track COVID outbreaks in a building. Organizations still retain their on-premises systems and operators manage it all from a single interface.  Also Read:- City of Chattanooga Deploys Genetec Security Center and Stratocast in Public-Private Policing Initiative

Nikhil Korgaonkar, Regional Director, Arcserve India & SAARC In today’s hyper-connected world, every single digital activity generates data. As IDC describes, the amount of digital data created over the next five years will be greater than twice the amount of data created since the advent of digital storage. In such an environment, it is more important than ever for businesses to protect their data from damage, destruction, or attack. It won’t be an exaggeration to say that the viability of every business now depends on constant access to its critical systems and data. At the same time, managing and protecting business data is no easy task. Businesses must constantly monitor the changing data landscape and be alert to new tools and challenges. They must be aware of the ever-evolving privacy regulations and security threats, which may appear from anywhere around the globe. In the space of data protection, what does 2022 herald? Here are four emerging trends that will shape the way companies approach data protection and management in the year ahead. 1 Protection of an ever-increasing attack surface will gain importance The attack surface includes all the possible ways an attacker can get into your company’s devices and networks and lock up or exfiltrate your data. So, it’s essential to keep the attack surface to a minimum. The problem is that the attack surface is continually growing as more people work remotely on multiple devices and create more entry points for cybercriminals to carry out cyberattacks. Worse still, the attack surface is constantly changing. It isn’t a single surface but many disparate fragments. Furthermore, control of endpoints is becoming increasingly complex as employees leave organizations and retrieval of equipment becomes harder. The bottom line is that breaches will inevitably happen. And in the coming year, companies will have to do a better job of recognizing breaches so they can extricate themselves as quickly as possible. Security and recovery strategies must be more thorough. As the attack surface expands, those strategies must cover not only the on-premises data but data in the cloud, at the edge, and everywhere in between. 2 Data sovereignty will add more complexity into data management As companies have grown globally and become more interconnected, the rules around data privacy have become far more complicated. For example, a company based in India may use a US-based company like Amazon or Google to store and send data. The question is, where does that Indian company’s data legally reside, and by what rules is it governed? The answers to these questions are complex and unclear. Every country has its own rules and regulations with regards to data transfer and storage. India, for instance, has defined rules in certain sectors, while in others it is still work in progress. In the insurance sector, the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India has defined that all original insurance policyholder records should be maintained in India. In the public contracting realm, 2017 Guidelines for Government Departments on Contractual Terms Related to Cloud Services required all government departments to include localisation provisions in their contract while obtaining cloud services. Localisation restrictions have also been placed on payment data. On April 6, 2018, the Reserve Bank of India, issued a circular mandating all payment system providers to store payment data locally only in India. Global experts of IT, legal, and HR are discussing passionately how to interpret our constantly evolving reality of data processing. That’s why 86% of IT decision-makers say their organizations have been impacted by changing compliance requirements for data privacy, according to a global survey conducted by Dimensional Research. Instead of storing all their data in their corporate headquarters, companies go for a multi-cloud approach, which means they have a globally distributed data infrastructure on-premise and in cloud. They must keep track of sovereignty issues in different jurisdictions, and to do this, they will need help. Cloud providers will have to work more closely with their customers to manage sovereignty and compliance with varying rules. In the year ahead, the onus will be on both businesses and public cloud providers to improve compliance and data sovereignty issues by better understanding what is in the petabytes of data they’re storing and the regulations around every element of that data. Businesses can no longer be satisfied by simply backing up data. They will have to get smart about their data content and put policies in place around that content. 3 Global supply-chain issues will become a data-protection issue Supply-chain issues are creating significant disruption to the global economy, with everything from cars and refrigerators to semiconductors and toys in short supply. And those issues look likely to continue well into 2022. Logistics issues and digital risks such as cyberattacks will cause further disruptions to the global supply chain in the coming year. In 2021, the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack took down the largest fuel pipeline in the U.S. and temporarily caused fuel shortages up and down the East Coast. The company paid the hackers nearly $5 million in ransom just a day after discovering malware on its systems. The supply chain will remain a top priority for organizations in 2022. That means they will need to be actively armed with data protection solutions to keep the supply chain working and meet the demands of their customers. Specifically, organizations will need to ensure that cyberattacks do not further compromise their supply chains and that data remains available 24/7 and can be instantly recovered. 4 The Data Protection Officer will grow in strategic Importance The Data Protection Officer (DPO) is an enterprise security leadership role that, under certain conditions, is required by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In fact, according to the latest GDPR stats, the demand for Data Protection Officers has risen by over 700% over the last five years. Data Protection Officers are responsible for having expert knowledge of data protection laws and practices while overseeing their company’s data protection strategy and ensuring compliance with GDPR requirements. The role of…