Real Words or Buzzwords?: Exponential Technology Advancement - RBCS

This is the 55th article in the award-winning “Real Words or Buzzwords?” series about how real words become empty words and stifle technology progress, also published on SecurityInfoWatch.com.

By Ray Bernard, PSP, CHS-III

The next 10 years of security technology will bring more change than in the entire history of the industry to now.

All-in-one RWOB

#1 Proof of the buzzword that killed tech advances in the security industry—but not other industries.

#2 Next Generation (NextGen): A sure way to tell hype from reality.

#3 Customer Centric: Why all security industry companies aren't customer centric.

#4 Best of Breed: What it should mean to companies and their customers.

#5 Open: An openness scale to rate platforms and systems

#6 Network-friendly: It's much more than network connectivity.

#7 Mobile first: Not what it sounds like.

#8 Enterprise Class (Part One): To qualify as Enterprise Class system today is world's beyond what it was yesterday.

#9 Enterprise Class (Part Two): Enterprise Class must be more than just a top-level label.

#10 Enterprise Class (Part Three): Enterprise Class must be 21st century technology.

#11 Intuitive: It’s about time that we had a real-world testable definition for “intuitive”.

#12 State of the Art: A perspective for right-setting our own thinking about technologies.

#13 True Cloud (Part One): Fully evaluating cloud product offerings.

#14 True Cloud (Part Two): Examining the characteristics of 'native-cloud' applications.

#15 True Cloud (Part Three): Due diligence in testing cloud systems.

#16 IP-based, IP-enabled, IP-capable, or IP-connectable?: A perspective for right-setting our own thinking about technologies.

#17 Five Nines: Many people equate high availability with good user experience, yet many more factors are critically important.

#18 Robust: Words like “robust” must be followed by design specifics to be meaningful.

#19 Serverless Computing – Part 1: Why "serverless computing" is critical for some cloud offerings.

#20 Serverless Computing – Part 2: Why full virtualization is the future of cloud computing.

#21 Situational Awareness – Part 1: What products provide situational awareness?

#22 Situational Awareness – Part 2: Why system designs are incomplete without situational awareness?

#23 Situational Awareness – Part 3: How mobile devices change the situational awareness landscape?

#24 Situational Awareness – Part 4: Why situational awareness is a must for security system maintenance and acceptable uptime.

#25 Situational Awareness – Part 5: We are now entering the era of smart buildings and facilities. We must design integrated security systems that are much smarter than those we have designed in the past.

#26 Situational Awareness – Part 6: Developing modern day situational awareness solutions requires moving beyond 20th century thinking.

#27 Situational Awareness – Part 7: Modern day incident response deserves the help that modern technology can provide but doesn’t yet. Filling this void is one of the great security industry opportunities of our time.

#28 Unicity: Security solutions providers can spur innovation by envisioning how the Unicity concept can extend and strengthen physical access into real-time presence management.

#29 The API Economy: Why The API Economy will have a significant impact on the physical security industry moving forward.

#31 The Built Environment: In the 21st century, “the built environment” means so much more than it did just two decades ago.

#32 Hyper-Converged Infrastructure: Hyper-Converged Infrastructure has been a hot phrase in IT for several years, but do its promises hold true for the physical security industry?

#33 Software-Defined: Cloud-computing technology, with its many software-defined elements, is bringing self-scaling real-time performance capabilities to physical security system technology.

#34 High-Performance: How the right use of "high-performance" can accelerate the adoption of truly high-performing emerging technologies.

#35 Erasure Coding: Why RAID drive arrays don’t work anymore for video storage, and why Erasure Coding does.

#36 Presence Control: Anyone responsible for access control management or smart building experience must understand and apply presence control.

#37 Internet+: The Internet has evolved into much more than the information superhighway it was originally conceived to be.

#38 Digital Twin: Though few in physical security are familiar with the concept, it holds enormous potential for the industry.

#39 Fog Computing: Though commonly misunderstood, the concept of fog computing has become critically important to physical security systems.

#40 Scale - Part 1: Although many security-industry thought leaders have advocated that we should be “learning from IT,” there is still insufficient emphasis on learning about IT practices, especially for large-scale deployments.

#41 Scale - Part 2: Why the industry has yet to fully grasp what the ‘Internet of Things’ means for scaling physical security devices and systems.

#42 Cyberspace - Part 1: Thought to be an outdated term by some, understanding ‘Cyberspace’ and how it differs from ‘Cyber’ is paramount for security practitioners.

#43 Cyber-Physical Systems - Part 1: We must understand what it means that electronic physical security systems are cyber-physical systems.

#44 Cyberspace - Part 2: Thought to be an outdated term by some, understanding ‘Cyberspace’ and how it differs from ‘Cyber’ is paramount for security practitioners.

#45 Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning: Examining the differences in these technologies and their respective benefits for the security industry.

#46 VDI – Virtual Desktop Infrastructure: At first glance, VDI doesn’t seem to have much application to a SOC deployment. But a closer look reveals why it is actually of critical importance.

#47 Hybrid Cloud: The definition of hybrid cloud has evolved, and it’s important to understand the implications for physical security system deployments.

#48 Legacy: How you define ‘legacy technology’ may determine whether you get to update or replace critical systems.

#49 H.264 - Part 1: Examining the terms involved in camera stream configuration settings and why they are important.

#50 H.264 - Part 2: A look at the different H.264 video frame types and how they relate to intended uses of video.

#51 H.264 - Part 3: Once seen as just a marketing term, ‘smart codecs’ have revolutionized video compression.

#52 Presence Technologies: The proliferation of IoT sensors and devices, plus the current impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, have elevated the capabilities and the importance of presence technologies.

#53 Anonymization, Encryption and Governance: The exponential advance of information technologies requires an exponential advance in the application of data protection.

#54 Computer Vision: Why a good understanding of the computer vision concept is important for evaluating today’s security video analytics products.

#55 Exponential Technology Advancement: The next 10 years of security technology will bring more change than in the entire history of the industry to now.

#56 IoT and IoT Native: The next 10 years of security technology will bring more change than in the entire history of the industry to now.

#57 Cloud Native IoT: A continuing look at what it means to have a 'True Cloud' solution and its impact on today’s physical security technologies.

#58 Bluetooth vs. Bluetooth LE: The next 10 years of security technology will bring more change than in the entire history of the industry to now.

#59 LPWAN - Low-Power Wide Area Networks: Emerging IoT smart sensor devices and systems are finding high-ROI uses for building security and safety.

#60 Edge Computing and the Evolving Internet: Almost 15 billion personal mobile devices and over 22 billion IoT devices operating daily worldwide have shifted the Internet’s “center of gravity” from its core to its edge – with many implications for enterprise physical security deployments

#61 Attack Surface: (Published as a Convergence Q&A Column article)An attack surface is defined as the total number of all possible entry points for unauthorized access into any system.

#62 Autonomous Compute Infrastructure: We’re on the brink of a radical new approach to technology, driven by autonomous operations.

#63 Physical Security Watershed Moment: We have reached a juncture in physical security technology that is making most of our past thinking irrelevant.

#64 Access Chaos: For 50 years we have had to live with physical access control systems that were not manageable at any large scale.

#65 AI and Automatiom: Will engineering talent, business savvy and capital investment from outside the physical security industry bring technology startups that transform reactive security to proactive and preventive security operations?

#66 Interoperability: Over the next five years, the single greatest determinant of the extent to which existing security industry companies will thrive or die is interoperability.

#67 AI Model : One key factor affects the accuracy, speed and computational requirements of AI

#68 Interoperability – Part 2: There are two types of security system interoperability – both of which are important considerations in the design of security systems and the selection of security system products.

#69 Interoperability – Part 3: There are two types of security system interoperability – both of which are important considerations in the design of security systems and the selection of security system products.

#70 Operationalizing AI: AI is not a product, but a broad category of software that enables products and systems to do more than ever before possible. How do we put it to good use?

#71 Shallow IT Adoption – Part 1: It’s not just about being IT compliant, it’s also about leveraging IT capabilities to properly serve the needs and wants of today’s technologically savvy customers.

#72 E-waste – an important security system design issue: Now e-waste is an important design issue not just because of growing e-waste regulations, but because educated designers can save enterprise security system customers a lot of money.

#73 LRPoE - Long Reach Power over Ethernet: A dozen factors have improved the business attractiveness of network cameras, making it more desirable to place cameras further from existing IT closets than the 328 foot limitation of standard Ethernet cable.

#74 NIST Declares Physical Access Control Systems are OT: Does it really mean anything that OT has joined the parade of labels (IT, IoT, and then IIoT) variously getting applied to security systems?

#75 Future Ready: Google sees the term "future-ready" trending up across many subject domains. But does that term apply to the physical security industry and its customers?

#76 Data KLiteracy: AI needs data. Thus, the ability of any department or division in an organization (including security) to use AI effectively depends on its ability to effectively obtain and utilize data – including security.

#77 Security Intelligence (upcoming): AI brings two kinds of intelligence to physical security systems – people bring the third.

More to come about every other week.

Future Vision

Compared to how we need to be thinking, our current approaches to security technology are like to trying to drive down a freeway by watching the rear view mirror. It won’t get you where you need to go. But what I just described couldn’t happen. By driving in the rear view mirror you’ll never end up on a freeway, as once you get out of the driveway or parking space and onto a street, you’re not likely to get far.

The only way to drive is by looking forward, and glancing at the rear-view and side mirrors to maintain an adequate mental map of what’s happening on the road. Rear-view and side mirrors are great assets when backing into a parking space, parallel parking, and backing out of a parking space.

Obviously, this analogy has limits, but it helps me to emphasize the fact that looking forward is what allows us to get somewhere as opposed to remaining stuck where we are.

The Biggest Challenge

The biggest challenge of exponential technology advancement is not the deployment and operation of advanced technology. That gets easier the more advanced the technology is. A good example is Calipsa’s cloud-based false alarm filtering video analytics platform. It takes less than five minutes to apply it to a single camera, but only if you need to outline the areas in the camera where people or vehicle motion is meaningful alarm-wise. Otherwise it takes seconds. This is possible because no additional equipment is needed, and it uses existing capabilities of the camera or VMS. In short order you have eliminated 90% to 98% of false alarms for the cameras where that matters.

This wasn’t possible just five years ago, but you can see why leading alarm monitoring services are using it today. It’s now become available for any organization with security video cameras.

Deploying and using this and other advanced technology is not the challenge. The challenge relates to our design thinking.

Primary Design Thinking Flaw

The primary flaw in our design thinking today is not thinking broadly enough. We still think primarily about responding to intrusions, access violations and detecting early stage prohibited behavior using machine-learning based video analytics. And we certainly can’t ignore those use cases.

However, in a modern organization any business unit must consider all the ways that it could advance the company mission, including non-traditional ways. That applies to the corporate security function as well.

Only a few leading security integrators are thinking along those lines, as I mentioned in my recent article for Security Business magazine titled, AI Readiness as a Service. About 50% of business digital transformation initiatives have already reached the point where they are considered successful in terms of improving business results. However, physical security has only been included in a few of those initiatives.

I asked Eric Yunag, Convergint’s VP of Technology & Innovation, about the potential importance of customer company digital transformation initiatives. He told me that he spent the previous year talking to customers about such initiatives, to gain an understanding of their dynamics, including their success factor. Eric explained, “As we advise some of the more forward-thinking customers, we think about what digital transformation, AI and computer vision mean to their businesses in a broader context.”

Yunag further explained that he asks these customers: What if you and your smartest people could stand here 24/7/365 and observe what goes on and log it to achieve full insight into the behavior and activities over time, and how would you optimize or better understand your most important customer or employee processes? “We know we are just scratching the surface on how we would turn those observations into data, how we would act on those insights, and ultimately the value that creates for customers,” Yunag says. “That’s the kind of discussion that company leaders want to have about digital transformation and how we can make the case for additional investment in visual intelligence infrastructure.”

Deon Chatterton, former Senior Manager of Corporate Security Technology for Cisco Systems, calls the emerging generation of AI-enabled video systems “enterprise video,” because the information generated by such systems is of value to many functional areas of a business, not just security.

Yunag adds, “While I am not saying such discussions are highly fruitful every time, there is always value in having them. Sometimes it is immediate, sometimes it pays off further down the road.” Such discussions enable security practitioners to think creatively and productively about non-traditional values that electronic security could provide, including visual intelligence derived from facility video.

Thinking Exponentially

There are two IT related megatrends that are fundamental to thinking about exponential technology advancement. The first is technology advancement, an upward trend, and the second is cost reduction, a downward trend. What’s important to know is that the previous unfulfilled promises of video analytics are now becoming possible, and the previously unaffordable technology deployments are becoming affordable.

In previous decades, the cost, complexity and difficulty of electronic security technology deployments was the primary barrier to achieved desired results. Today, the primary barrier is the shortcomings in our thinking.

What Is Exponential Technology?

It is a little known, but provable fact, that all information technology advances follow the same type of growth curve. It starts out slow, starts to build, and then takes off like a rocket.

A number of individuals have closely examined these technology trends. Chief among them is Ray Kurzweil, a highly accomplished inventor; futurist and author. In 2012, Kurzweil became the Director of Engineering at Google. About technology advancement, Kurzweil says, “. . . if a technology is an information technology, the basic measures of price/performance and capacity (per unit of time or cost, or other resource) follow amazingly precise exponential trajectories.”

The two hard drive cost and capacity trends are well-illustrated by plotting out the cost and capacity trends of computer hard drives, shown in Figure 1 below. I created this diagram in 2015 for an article in Security Technology Executive magazine.

Figure 1. Hard drive exponential trends.

According to the Fiscal Year 2020 Summary section of Seagate’s 2020 Form 10 K report, the price of hard drives had just fallen from 3 cents per gigabyte in to 2 cents in two years’ time. And we still have to remember that the two IT megatrends of falling prices and rising capabilities are still accelerating.

The impact of these technology advancement trends on security video surveillance is that today affordable enterprise video storage systems measure their capacities in tens or hundreds of terabytes, and soon that will become petabytes (1,000 terabytes).

The computer processing required for deep-learning based video analytics exceeds what legacy video servers are capable of. However, such processing capability is available now from Dell, for example, both on-site and in cloud-based systems.

Stop Thinking About Technology

Even though this article has been discussing technology advances, the most important think we can do is stop thinking about technology itself. Current and emerging technology is affordable enough and capable enough that instead, we should be thinking about use cases. Instead of taking pride in the size of the security technology deployments they achieve, Integrators, consultants and security practitioners should take pride in the use cases that their systems support.

What uses of the technology bring the greatest value to the business? That is the key question and the primary focus of attention. Today’s most valuable use cases involve three elements:

Data collection
Data integration
Data correlation and analysis

This applies to real-time applications, such as live responses to in-store customer behavior via mobile app instant offerings and human staff response, and trend discovery and tracking. What kinds of data can electronic security systems and devices provide? How can that data be correlated with other data to provide actionable insights?

Organization stakeholders include a variety of functional areas plus IT Data Governance – whose responsibilities include discovery of data valuable to the business and making sure that the business makes maximum use of that data. Conversations with folks having data governance responsibilities can very informative, and it’s their job to help functional areas explore potential data value opportunities.

Initially It’s a Learning Experience

For the first time in history, both technology trends and business trends are making it increasingly more feasible for security practitioners to participate in AI-enabled and data-driven organizational advancement occurring across all functional areas.

At the start, it is a learning experience for security practitioners, who can benefit from the lessons learned and insights gained by the progress to date of digital transformation initiatives. Given that most practitioners are already fully tasked, it is a realistic expectation that learning about the work of data governance and gaining knowledge about the expanding roles of analytics and automation in the organization, could easily take a year or more of progressive discussion and discovery.

At some point in that process, possible use cases will start becoming apparent for electronic security technology and devices, and their data integrations, to provide actionable business information in big and small ways. This will accelerate as technology continues to advance, and as successes are shared through security and industry associations and their communities, as well as personal networking.

It is exponentially advancing information technology – with which we build and expand our electronic security systems – that is making it possible for business security functions to become a larger participant in providing value that forwards the business mission.