ISJ hears from Alex Segeda, Business Development Manager, EMEAI, Western Digital.
The smart video surveillance market worldwide is experiencing remarkable momentum.
Projected to grow at a 12.1% annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2030, the sector has evolved from experimental deployments to operational necessity.
Organisations across industries are racing to implement AI-powered analytics, real-time security detection and intelligent monitoring systems that promise competitive advantages and transformative returns.
But beneath this trend lies one reality that decision-makers often underestimate: For smart video to deliver on AI’s promise, infrastructure choices in edge and cloud deployments matter as much as algorithms.
The success of intelligent surveillance depends not just on sophisticated cameras and software stacks, but on the storage architectures that underpin them.
Without reliable, scalable and strategically designed storage that can scale, AI-powered video cannot function effectively – and organisations risk missing security events, violating retention requirements and degrading analytics accuracy, while facing spiralling costs.
Truth one: AI transforms terabytes into petabytes
According to IDC, annual global data volumes will more than double to 527.5 Zettabytes by 2029. The surveillance industry contributes to this explosion, driven by continuous high-resolution streams from 4K, 8K or even 12K cameras deployed across smart venues, businesses and cities.
With AI’s rise in smart video surveillance, these data demands intensify further. In intelligent systems, streams and metadata are ingested continuously, analysed in real-time for anomaly recognition, stored for forensic investigation and reused for model training.
These requirements set new benchmarks for backend capacity and performance to unlock smart video’s value.
Practical use cases demonstrate the scale. Big entertainment venues in the UK that fit up to 90,000 people are able to analyse spectator streams to improve traffic flow, identify incidents and enhance security.
Shopping malls can use smart detection to measure footfall, track theft in real-time and optimise concession sales. High-security institutions can leverage facial recognition to prevent unauthorised access to restricted areas.
To enhance motion capture or object recognition and to help ensure compatibility with analytic engines, smart video cameras can jump from 720p to 1080p, 4K or beyond with increased frame rates and retention periods. Related systems record, log and analyse all this data to help make sure smart applications function correctly.
These parameters explosively grow the required storage footprint. Yet many organisations still underestimate the volume of storage capacity that their smart video systems may require.
To illustrate: An entertainment venue wants to upgrade their smart video system, opting for 4K cameras to improve image clarity.
While the IT anticipated higher storage needs, they fail to account for the impact of recording at 30 frames per second (FPS) and saving multiple streams for AI analytics. On top of that, their corporate policy mandates a 90-day retention period, which triples the expected storage footprint.
Within one month, this venue would run into bottlenecks, compromising performance and video availability.
By utilising a surveillance storage calculator while planning the system, organisations can prevent such scenarios and avoid potential capacity shortfalls or performance restrictions.
Truth two: Purpose-built drives separate success from failure
Traditional desktop storage approaches were never designed for the scale or durability of modern multi-stream video analytics.
Organisations connecting high-resolution cameras, recorders and analytics engines now benefit from deploying purpose-built smart video storage solutions offering 24/7 reliability, superior thermal management, optimised firmware for sequential writes and the capability to record multiple high-resolution streams simultaneously.
These solutions can deliver high-capacity storage for video analytic servers, AI systems and deep learning applications. With enterprise-class workload ratings, purpose-built drives can handle both single-stream HD cameras and concurrent AI streams, providing flexibility that enables businesses to upgrade and scale while preventing storage bottlenecks, dropped frames and corrupted footage.
In large-scale operations, when there are hundreds of cameras connected, the best fitted storage setup might extend beyond individual drive metrics.
Choosing a right-sized storage platform can provide enough capacity to store months of video data depending on the video resolution, frame rate and compression.
Referring to the example mentioned before (240 4K cameras, 30 FPS, 90 days retention period, H.264 video format), this entertainment venue would generate several petabytes of video data – data volumes that go beyond DVR and NVR capacities.
Truth three: Storage is a strategic imperative
The rise of the AI-driven data economy brings additional complexity through digital sovereignty requirements. The push for data sovereignty reshapes the collection, processing and storing of smart video data.
Operators must navigate requirements for video footage containing features like biometric identifiers, facial recognition and behavioural insights.
These considerations directly influence IT architecture decisions. Where video data resides, retention duration, access controls and audit capabilities depend on underlying storage infrastructures.
Treating storage as an afterthought rather than strategic foundation creates compliance risks, operational inefficiencies and scaling limitations.
Building the right foundation
Organisations should shift their mindset and design around architectural principles like the following:
- First, design for data locality – deploy storage and compute closer to camera infrastructure in edge data centres, reducing reliance on distant cloud resources. Local deployments help minimise latency, improve analytics responsiveness, reduce bandwidth costs and support sovereignty and privacy requirements
- Second, invest in scalable storage – smart video generates immense data volumes. Storage solutions that can easily scale cost-effectively are essential for meeting retention mandates, supporting investigations and enabling AI model development. Utilising surveillance storage calculators during planning prevents capacity shortfalls and performance restrictions
- Third, build ecosystems balancing sovereignty and scale – sensitive video data can remain in local environments while public cloud resources support non-sensitive workloads such as collaborative analytics, model training and burst capacity.
Why infrastructure comes first
The transformation of smart video will likely be shaped by storage infrastructure capable of scaling efficiently and sustainably. Despite the focus on AI-enabled cameras and sophisticated analytics software, the backbone of any intelligent surveillance strategy remains the storage architecture beneath it.
For surveillance operators, system integrators and enterprise security teams, this represents both challenge and opportunity.
Those who recognise that successful AI-powered video depends on robust, future-ready infrastructure can gain measurable security, compliance and operational advantages.
As AI becomes integral to modern smart video systems, organisations can thrive when they treat data storage as strategic assets rather than technical necessities.
Building the right foundation means making deliberate architectural choices that support data growth, respect privacy and regulatory obligations and scale sustainably over time. The organisations making these decisions today can define the next era of smart, secure and responsible video systems.
References
- https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/video-surveillance-market-report
- https://my.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US53383425
- https://www.wembleystadium.com/news/2013/apr/25/90-years-of-wembley-stadium#:~:text=The%20capacity%20is%20now%2090%2C000,3%20draw%20on%2024%20March
- https://www.westerndigital.com/en-in/tools/surveillance-capacity-calculator
EMEAI, Western Digital
