Johnson Controls has big plans for Tyco Cloud

MILWAUKEE—Johnson Controls recently unveiled Tyco Cloud, a new cloud-based security suite developed to help customers move costly and complex security infrastructure for access control and video surveillance to the cloud.

With Tyco Cloud, Johnson Controls said organizations can reduce costs, improve enterprise security management and scale security operations on demand, allowing users to protect lives, assets and facilities through management of access control, video surveillance and other security operations using secure cloud services and connected devices such as cloud cameras and controllers. Cloud solutions from Tyco run on an open and modern microservices architecture to ensure fast, scalable and secure services.
“Our customers worldwide are embracing and accelerating digital transformation to make their businesses more intelligent, agile and cost effective,” Martin Renkis, general manager of Cloud Solutions, Global Security Products at Johnson Controls, said in the announcement. “Tyco Cloud empowers this digital transformation with on-demand security management that enables organizations to securely and cost-effectively customize their video surveillance and access control solutions based on site-specific and enterprise-wide requirements.”

Renkis told Security Systems News that this digital transformation “means moving a lot of complex and expensive infrastructure, especially in security, to the cloud. When they [customers] do this, they enable all of these other benefits, including the benefits of big data, IoT and AI, which over the next five years are all going to play a more important role in what our customers are doing and what we will be able to offer.”

Renkis said interest in cloud is growing rapidly. “Cloud is not new but it has finally reached what we call a 'commercially exciting level,' so people are now spending money on cloud in ways they never did before,” he told SSN. “In terms of demand, we have experienced a 125 percent increase in our enterprise cloud solution requests over the past 12 months, and these are requests from our customers saying, 'We need cloud.'”

He continued, “Within five years we expect that 50 percent of our customers will be purchasing some level of cloud-based services from us, and I think that is pretty conservative. We are going to grow our cloud surveillance business by more than 500 percent on the revenue side in our next fiscal year (Oct. - Sept.), and launch our new line of access control cloud solutions and expect a great return on that.”

For video surveillance, organizations can enable Tyco Cloud with any Illustra Cloud Camera or leverage existing camera systems using Tyco Cloud Gateways, which will automatically locate existing cameras from dozens of different manufacturers on a network and enable secure cloud management of those cameras.

Tyco Cloud enables video storage in camera, in gateway, in low-latency cloud, in high-latency cloud or a hybrid combination to support unlimited flexibility and cost effectiveness. The interface allows users to customize multiple recording parameters, such as which cameras to record and for how long, video resolution, as well as create unique upload schedules to minimize bandwidth consumption. The service also offers Cold Cloud video storage for cost-effective, high-latency, online archiving. The new Hyper View feature enables users to search through 24 hours of recorded video from up to 100 cameras within 60 seconds. Tyco Cloud surveillance also supports powerful analytics such as heat mapping, object detection and crowd formation, to name a few.

For access control, the new ioSmart solutions from Tyco Cloud empower smartphone-based mobile credentials and smart-key-managed access control for companies to securely allow personnel to conveniently access facilities using their smartphones without the security risk of lost, stolen or cloning of legacy card technologies. Tyco Cloud ioSmart was designed to deliver convenience, cost savings and advanced security for access control.

The Tyco Cloud Enterprise Manager portal provides users with a comprehensive view of their entire security solution through a single interface. It offers real-time status and management of every connected device on a clickable global map. This simple dashboard also enables tracking and management of users, bandwidth utilization, cloud storage and device firmware.

Additionally, Tyco Cloud secures all data from any device to the cloud and to the end user. Every connected device as well as the cloud platform are supported by Johnson Controls' Cyber Solutions Product Security Program, which delivers enhanced safeguards against cyber attacks, including additional controls for proper password management and end-to-end encrypted communications.