This is the 60th 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
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.
All-in-one RWOB
MAXIMIZE YOUR SECURITY OPERATIONS CAPABILITIES
Upgrade your security operations effectiveness through Security Technology Strategic Planning. Provably get more for your company's security technology investment.
★ ★ ★ GET NOTIFIED! ★ ★ ★
SIGN UP to be notified by email the day a new Real Words or Buzzwords? article is posted!
Real Words or Buzzwords?
The Award-Winning Article Series
#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.
The original Internet that we built was designed based on decades-old technology (originally dial-up telephone lines) and released for use to a society who had little exposure to computer technology and for many people that was mostly at work. As the use of websites expanded, information technology continued to advance. The core of the Internet was expanded to keep up with demand, with high-speed networking and computer virtualization facilitating and accelerating its growth.
Internet Expansion
Internet expansion continued chiefly under the original Internet architecture, which became increasingly problematic with the arrival of mobile devices operated by humans, and connected devices that didn’t require human operation (the Internet of Things – IoT).
As of 2018, 90% of the world’s data had been created in the prior two years. Every day, we create roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. With the explosive growth of IoT, this data creation rate will become even greater. And it’s all happening at the edge of the Internet.
>Giant Data Centers Aren’t Solving the Problem
Synergy Research says more than 100 hyperscale facilities were built in 2020, making the total number close to 600. As of January 2021, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google collectively accounted for over half of all major data centers and continue to be significant drivers of data center growth. Data centers continue to be located where land and electricity are cheap.
That’s a significant factor in those three companies all investing significantly in data centers in Idaho. In February of 2022, Meta (formerly Facebook) announced plans to build an $800M hyperscale campus in Idaho. As part of that move, it agreed to buy Iowa Wind Farm’s entire capacity to power its data center campus.
Thus, today’s data centers are as remote as they can get from the majority of the end-users and the IoT devices that generate the vastly increased amounts of data needing processing. They aren’t solving the mobile and IoT Internet user problem.
Evolving the Internet for Today’s and Tomorrow’s Needs
This is why one year ago, Vapor IO and VMWare announced the formation of the Open Grid Alliance (OGA), joined by Dell Technologies, DriveNets, MobiledgeX, and PacketFabric as founding members. The OGA, now with 32 members, proposes vastly increasing the number of small edge data centers along with the number of direct connects to the Internet.
Consider, for example, a 5G and 6G wireless future with affordable and highly available high-speed fiber-optic networking running to an edge data center at nearly every cell tower. That would mean microsecond transaction times for high volume IoT data processing at the edge – such as for security and retail operation video analytics and manufacturing’s production line machine vision.
It would also mean high-speed high-volume wireless IoT data connections, which is critical for autonomous vehicle safe operation and for city traffic management. And it’s a crucial need for smart cities and smart buildings, which today’s affordable technology is bringing more broadly within reach.
The original internet had only a few dozen and then a few thousand end users. As of January 2022, 4.95 billion (roughly 62.5% of the world’s population) people use the Internet. Although there have been many government and private projects around the world named “Next Generation Internet” over the past two decades – all were based on previous-era technology.
This is why the Linux Foundation has an Edge computing project as do hundreds of major IT domain players, why IT and business analyst firms have been paying attention, and why a Google search on “edge computing” (in quotes) generates over 17 million search results.
Edge Computing Comes to ISC West
So, it should be no surprise that at ISC West 2022, two advanced technology IT companies announced themselves to the physical security industry. Vapor IO’s Kinetic Grid Platform brings both high-speed networking and cloud computing resources to establish highly affordable edge computing.
The design of the Kinetic Grid’s resource location considers specific geographies, population centers, and fiber routes to offer low-latency colocation and connectivity in service of first and last-mile networks and nearby premises. Each Kinetic Edge market becomes part of a nationwide Kinetic Grid via private fiber backbones that connect across markets, offering built-in edge-to-edge capabilities.
Hypersive, an IT company whose founders have deep IT and physical security operations expertise and deployment experience, delivers current building management and physical security applications as a service, in the cloud, on-premises, or near-premises using Vapor IO’s Kinetic Grid. Jeff Gelb, co-founder and CEO of Hypersive, said, “The Kinetic Grid is in making edge computing more or less turn-key, widespread, and easy to get.”
Hypersive’s first offering is Milestone XProtect® VMS as a service, simplifying deployments for integrators and facilitating high-performing and affordable XProtect system expansion to any site location. This allows integrators and end-users to focus on how to best optimize their use of the XProtect VMS, without having to pay attention to deployment details, including camera licenses.
VMS server deployments that would formerly have been complex and taken weeks and months, can now be accomplished in days, with high availability now possible for every site deployment regardless of its size or location.
Edge Computing Terminology
Along with the Internet’s expanded architecture for edge computing come several IT terms that, while not new, have meanings that are different from what their English terms seem to state. That will be the subject of the next Real Words or Buzzwords? article.