JANUARY 2021
VETERAN'S COLUMN
The 6 Technology Trends Affecting the Security Sector in 2021
Johan Paulsson, CTO, Axis Communications talks about key security trends of 2021.
It’s useful when looking forward to first look backward: hindsight has a wonderful way of providing context for future-gazing activity. And when looking back over the past year, one insight could understandably be that attempting to predict the future is a futile activity. While the COVID-19 pandemic had taken hold in Asia before the end of 2019, few would have predicted the enormous impact it would have across the world throughout 2020. Within a short space of time, our way of life, working practices and business operations were upended. Travel restrictions, social distancing rules, increased hygiene requirements and the pressure placed on health services all affected our business and the security sector. In dealing with the impact on our own business and workforce – with employee health and safety at the forefront – we also saw new use cases emerge for our technology and solutions, in addition to new ways of working, that will continue into 2021 and beyond. Technological advancement continues, however, and as we have seen in recent years, rather than heralding the emergence of completely new technologies, the trends we see for 2021 are shaped by how and why technologies are used, and the associated implications.
Trust remains at the top of the agenda we've mentioned trust in previous trend posts, and it’s become even more critical. Many factors contribute to maintaining trust, and the technology sector is under more scrutiny now than ever before. Customers and end-users are demanding transparency around how tech is used and how data is managed, especially with increased surveillance. This, together with the need to maintain privacy, will be a key challenge.
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Johan Paulsson
CTO|Axis Communications
Renewed discussions around trust will directly impact how organizations in all sectors actively demonstrate why they are trustworthy. Due to its nature, the security sector will be under even more pressure to double down on its efforts in this area.
• The world goes horizontal
Recent years have seen applications and services largely designed for specific environments, whether server-based, in the cloud or at the edge. Driven by a desire to achieve optimal performance, scalability, and flexibility, along with the benefits of accessing and using data at any time and from anywhere, the next year will see momentum towards horizontal integration between environments. Increasingly intelligent applications and services will be deployed across all three instances – server, cloud and edge – employing the best capabilities of each, improving solution performance and efficiency. For example, edge analytics in a surveillance camera will potentially message an operator with an alert, the operator then accessing the live video feed through a cloud-based application to verify and respond. This shift to a ‘horizontal’ approach will increase the speed and accuracy of security and surveillance – moving from reactive to proactive, manual to automated – while also reducing bandwidth, energy and cost.
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