The age of security convergence

According to IHS forecasts, the IoT market will grow to an installed base of 75.4 billion by 2025, with analysts predicting security and industrial asset management among the biggest drivers. In fact, asset protection is of increasing global importance, especially as cybercrime continues to be on a meteoric rise.

In 2017 alone, the annual cost of cybercrime hit $600 billion worldwide, fueled by the growing sophistication of hackers, the proliferation of criminal marketplaces and cryptocurrencies and an expanded attack surface, according to a report produced by security firm McAfee in conjunction with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Cybersecurity has often been focused on conventional threats, but new Advanced Persistent Threats and malware attacks are becoming unconventional, taking advantage of every new attack surface such as in the physical domain. As a result, monitoring this environment is becoming increasingly complex as ever-larger quantities of video and IoT sensor-related data need to be processed, analyzed and managed in context to digital forensic evidence.

As a result, physical security technology is becoming an increasingly important tool in the fight against cybercrime and is expected to exceed $100 billion by 2019, which is more than double today's market value. As the physical world becomes increasingly connected, closer attention needs to be paid to cyber and physical security risks to evaluate businesses' as well as our critical infrastructure's readiness for a cyber or physical attack.

Organizations do not need to recreate the wheel, however. Network and physical security can fight cybercrime, but there must be greater convergence among existing security approaches. Furthermore, there must be greater collaboration across private and government databases - tapping multiple data streams from mobile, CCTV, IP and geo location information.

Until now, it has been difficult to incorporate security camera data with IT data to garner a full picture of cybercrime activity. Given the plethora of devices used in IoT, extracting data efficiently and evaluating to make real-time decisions based on actionable data, is incredibly challenging. Structured data, such as GPS coordinates and motion detection are easily organized and acted upon by computers. However, unstructured data, such as video and images, is not so easily classified or understood.

With the advent of advanced video analytics and IoT we will soon witness a new wave of security. By leveraging high-performance video analytics, business intelligence, AI facial recognition and machine learning, we will be able to make sense of unstructured data and transmitting, along with the time of collection to form an event and drive actionable insights. In doing so, we will be ableto facilitate real-time responses to events from IoT devices and CCTV equipment that will enable us to notify authorities of suspicious network and packet activities or give businesses the power to detect a new copier repair guy has turned up at times well outside the usual schedule, for instance.

And thanks to the growing convergence of IoT and advancing technologies, we are now better able to intelligently analyze petabytes of structured and unstructured data, helping organizations not only predict suspicious activities before they occur, but help crack down on local and cross-border cybercrimes.

Moving ahead, the easier data is to access and analyze, whether this is structure or unstructured, the quicker suspicious activity can be flagged, and nefarious activity can be stopped before it occurs. Convergent security is the future and it shows great promise, serving as a shield and sword in battle against cyber and physical crime.

Dr. Spincer Koh is a thirty-year technology veteran, Dr. Spincer Koh is the CEO and co-founder of Gorilla Technology, a provider of video intelligence and IoT Big Data solutions that supports a wide range of video-centric and content management applications for retail, enterprise and surveillance.