Bad Marketing Beware - Intransa is Back!

The petition seems to asks that any DHS security grant to schools, whether video related or not, trigger a mandatory video reporting requirement.

The petition says, "We ask that DHS require that uptime of the video streams, what percent of video data met retention compliance requirements, and if there was any tampering of the video data files." This unclear language is more confusing than helpful.

Most companies have a formal review process which mitigates these sorts of issues for releases involving public exposure of this magnitude.

On the plus side, I encourage my pre-teen children to be active in commerce and business attempts, so I wouldn't want to discourage any similar attempts in this company.

On the minus side, is this the company's best effort at a petition to the U.S. government, read, agreed to, and signed by as many U.S. citizens as possible?

Whether for $5/camera/month or even for free, when you consider which companies to allow inside your firewall, do you give any consideration to the care they demonstrate with their own public persona?

Really glad I turned down the offer from them a few years back....

Don't most NVR/DVR's have video loss detection alerts and can't you just run a report from the head end you already own?

Remember where this discussion started: a petition to create regulations mandating external reporting of video system status. If such a petition were initiated by a public service, consumer, or citizen organization, that would be one thing, but on the face of it, how is it out of line for one to infer an inherent organization conflict of interest within this seemingly reasonable and selfless petition?

Hi Horace,

My background is more IT based. In driving operational excellence, there is an adage that if you aren't measuring it, you can't manage it. The expectation is that when you figure out what is important and start measuring it, you can drive meaningful operational improvement.

When we turned our focus on Video Surveillance, we did an analysis of what are the key measures for this application which I've articulated in the "3 Must Have KPIs for Video Surveillance" white paper which you can get from our website to focus how we can help people. They really come down to uptime, retention and video quality/risk measures. If you care about the video surveillance application, these measures become strategic.

There are customers who don't prioritize video. Budgets are thin, teams are overworked and infrastructure decays. Invariably, there is an event that happens that causes people to realize the impact of not having their video surveillance infrastructure adequately supported. Because of the randomness of these incidents, there is a polynomial (non-linear) impact of exposure as you let infrastructure decay (i.e., a 10% outage rate among your video infrastructure exposes you greater than 10% of risk).

Environments that have a high probability of incidents tend to have people more experienced with the impact of these exposures. Hospitals, school systems, and universities have been good markets for us for these reasons. High-tech manufacturers, public infrastructure and ports worrying about protecting people and critical assets are also willing customers. CSO's who have had significant experience, IT directors responsible for surveillance find that these measures resonate with the desire to be under control of their operations. Not knowing is a scary, risk-blind situation for them.

Among security integrators, we've found two types: those who see this as strategic way to scale their abilities and deliver differentiation; and those who are threatened by the prospect of having historic mistakes exposed. What I ask the latter whether it possible to be perfectly successful if you lacked the tools to help you be successful. If you are pretending to be under control when you are not, time and events will be your enemy anyway.

A recurring problem that people in this industry express, and is echoed to some degree by John's objections, is the absence of budgets which prevent people from adequately resourcing infrastructure upgrades and putting adequate procedures in place. What government regulators have found in telecommunications, banking and other industries with mission critical infrastructure is that creating regulatory requirements with significant enough penalties creates the business justification to implement proper procedures. Having sold into these industries, a bank that has a $100k penalty per hour of service outage will then have the business case to put in the proper redundant infrastructure. Without that, institutions will be torn between this quarter's slightly better profit number and defending against what some might perceive as a black-swan event. School systems around the country should recognize that they have an exposure to active shooter situations which are rare, but sadly becoming more prevelant. But many don't. If you are putting in this infrastructure, you may not understand what it takes to make it work and keep it working. Rather than leaving it to individuals with conflicting priorities and varying degress of experience, regulations give guidance and incentives to put the right infrastructure, resources and procedures in place. That is why advocating for this, while correlating with some self interest, does have merit.

I disagree with John that this is somehow unimportant or not needed. People are putting in cameras as a way to reduce human guards. Having guard hours then allocated to auditing this infrastructure doesn't work over time and scale. Aside from being an expensive way to solve the problem, humans, at best, are only capable of 3-sigma of accuracy in manual procedures. That means roughly 1 in every 12-14 steps will be a mistake. Moreover, people regularly confuse being able to see live video feeds as evidence that everything is fine when actually the system isn't recording for one reason or another.

I also disagree with John that Vunetrics failure is evidence that there isn't a problem worth solving. What they offered was a tool which gave you measures and they charged you by the measure. This is completely the wrong orientation in my view. People, especially if your background is law enforcement or military, can't make sense of a thousand blinking lights. Moreover, understanding what to measure is not obvious for people. The potential for false alarms is very high. If my CPU is loaded, is that a problem? Not necessarily as these systems saturate networks and storage and can use significant amounts of CPU, but if every video stream is recording successfully for as long as you need, there isn't an issue. Finally, I've found that people with enough experience will have an anecdote of how some obscure measure proved to be important in one situation or another.

Our approach is completely different from Vunetrics. We collect as much as we can to answer the question if the video is okay. The more we collect, the more accurate we can be. Also, by being a cloud service, as we collect more data and scenarios, we can improve our analysis and recommendations. As we improve our analytics, every customer benefits. This stops putting users in the position of having to know what is important to collect and watch. Instead, we let them know when something has happened, how important it is and what to do about it. They can use the interface to verify or further diagnose the problem if our analysis is incomplete. And we have experts on this application which can help if needed.

It is quite possible that we have over-engineered a solution for this marketplace. What I don't understand is why this group wouldn't want this problem to be solved. At the very least, it is a model for what is possible you could hold all your vendors to. Is it possible that the noise from the Intransa experience is clouding people's judgement?

Viakoo Co-founder Mark McCourt has taken a day job.