Video Management Systems arrived 15 years ago and have been one of the top technologies to transform the IP video surveillance market. Modern VMS has evolved substantially from its start as a simple surveillance system offering video data recording and playback, to going far beyond simplistic control of cameras and videos, emerging more as a security platform, which caters for a range of additional security features.

“It is no longer sufficient to refer to it as a video management system because it is now a fully-fledged software security-platform,” says Max de Lorm, director, IPVS, a distribution business specialising in IP video surveillance software, hardware and systems. “Offering significantly more than a traditional VMS, modern security platforms have evolved into systems that provide a huge range of features, add-ons, and integration options. The end result is that they offer a tool that is able to manage much more than just the video surveillance environment
 
He says that in today’s surveillance sector there are some very significant technology enhancements bringing improved functionality to the security platform and impacting the paralleled rise in its development and implementation:
 

• Access control integration – security platforms now bring access or biometric data into the video surveillance system.
• Alarm integration – offers greater situational awareness with alarms generated by standard intruder alarm technology.
• Video analytics – analysing video streams in real-time to provide event detection and threat management. For example perimeter protection and presence detection.
• Mobile device integration – this has moved beyond delivering video to a mobile device, users are now able to push system alarms to a mobile device, making the device a security management tool. In addition, mobile devices can also record video and send it back to the recording server for managing incidents (i.e. the mobile behaves as though it were a camera on the surveillance network).
• Edge recording: the camera uses a storage device, such as an SD card and records locally. The video is then streamed back to the central data store or remains on the camera. This offers a potential storage saving and also offers redundancy as the camera can continue to record even if the central store is down.
• Cloud storage: locally cloud archiving is still in its infancy, but vendors are starting to offer online cloud storage for transmitting archives either as a backup, or to replace local storage entirely.

De Lorm concludes that demand is specifically growing for customised security platforms: “Sectors such as retail, financial services, manufacturing, logistics and facilities management are all perfect candidates for this technology and we anticipate continued interest from these vertical sectors.”