April 20th 2016 saw the latest iLegal conference taking place in Johannesburg. With presenters and visitors from around the country, iLegal 2016 was well supported, and according to attendees’ comments, well worth the time to attend.
While the event covered a broad spectrum of topics, a short review of each will follow, there were some common themes that kept reappearing throughout the day. It seems the surveillance world has quickly moved from being the old physical security domain of guys with guns and barriers to control ingress and egress, to be a more intelligent guardian of safety and security.
The keynote presentation was focused on intelligence, specifically obtaining intelligence from your surveillance operations instead of just videos. Just as the IT world is making a noise about big data, the ability to sort through mountains of data and extract value, the surveillance world is on a similar path.
The difference in surveillance is that we not only rely on data – in this case video – for our information source, but also people, specifically the operators behind the scenes. The combination of technology and people offers organisations the best option to do more than look for video evidence after the fact. Well trained people and effectively designed, installed and maintained technology can create a proactive solution that still provides evidence, but also intelligence to prevent or mitigate dangerous events.
Apart from intelligence and people (people with effective training and the right aptitude), control rooms or nerve centres as they are likely to be called in future, are also a critical factor in tomorrow’s surveillance world. Within the scope of the control room, we will see cloud and mobile technology being employed to assist operators and managers, and we can expect to see control rooms taking on more than security tasks. It’s likely that your control room, whether on an estate, a mall or a business campus, will take responsibility for everything from surveillance monitoring to plumbing and even fielding calls from irate customers (to a limited extent).
ilegal 2016 was a full day of information overload, but the presenters outdid themselves in informing and educating. A new format, that of a panel of experts was a great success in trying to discover the legalities around drone use in South Africa. For the first time we also had someone talking about cyber security and how it impacts, or is impacted by security operations on the IP platform. The Internet of Things (IoT) may not be a common term in security as yet, but the industry is already a part of the whole concept.
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