Surveillance for safe, smart cities needs big storage capacity: Seagate head (IANS Interview)

Surveillance cameras alone cannot guarantee comprehensive safety and security for citizens, a key aspect of the government's "Smart Cities Project", and must be dovetailed with excellent backup via big data storage, an industry expert has said.

"Good quality footage captured from closed-circuit cameras, irrespective of the time and tenure of footage, is necessary to study and plan the measures to ensure safety and security of the masses," said Rajesh Khurana, Country Manager for India and Saarc for Seagate Technology.

"For insulating the critical video surveillance data from damage or theft, the government, like any other organisation using video surveillance infrastructure, should also resort to efficient data-storage solution," Khurana told IANS in an interview.

"The solution should have features like high-write workloads, high reliability to record and store footage 24x7, low-power profile to save energy by resting during 'no motion', and world-class storage technology with excellent data back-up and recovery system."

According to 6Wresearch, a research and consulting firm, the India video Surveillance market is projected to grow at a compounded annual growth of over 13 percent between 2016 and 2022. The market size is expected to top $2.4 billion by 2020, it added.

Similarly, Gartner has projected that within India's information technology and data centre infrastructure market of $2.12 billion by 2019, big data storage market will top $323 million.

Khurana said video surveillance in India is expected to grow at an impressive rate given the projects like Smart Cities, for which alone the outlay is $15 billion for the upgrade of 500 and creating 100 new ones, as also the government's emphasis on homeland security.

"Growth of public infrastructure, increasing IT spending and security spending are boosting the growth of this sector in India. All these applications of video surveillance create a lot of data, which needs to be stored for future analysis and monitoring," said Khurana.

"This is when Seagate comes into the picture. The bigger the surveillance market in India will get, the higher opportunity Seagate will get to offer its data storage solutions for such infrastructure," he said.

Whether it is for better security, efficiency or for more revenue generation, an increasing number of companies and consumers are migrating to high-definition digital video solutions and more active cameras.

"All these will lead to data explosion and in turn will drive demand for better storage solutions," Khurana said.

Seagate provides various data storage solutions in over 25 countries around the world. In India, Seagate has its core business support offices in New Delhi and technical-support facilities in Bangalore and Pune.

"We currently have a workforce of over 600 employees in India and we will grow organically to support the business as necessary," Khurana said, adding the country was one of the most dynamic and vital markets for the company in terms of its innovative storage solutions.

(Aparajita Gupta can be reached at aparajita.g@ians.in)

--IANS

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