VSaaS market worth about $2.39 billion by 2017

DALLAS—The global video surveillance as a service market is expected to reach $2.39 billion by 2017, expanding at a CAGR of 31.5 percent from 2012 to 2017, according to a report from MarketsandMarkets, a market research and consulting firm based here. At the end of 2011, the global VSaaS market was worth $474 million.

The report encompasses the service element of the market, which includes hosted, managed and hybrid video services, as well as the components aspect, which includes cameras, storage, servers and video analytics.

The growth of the market is being fueled by rapid advances in the cloud computing and storage IT revolution, the report said, noting that the “slow-adopting” video surveillance space is beginning to get involved in this transformation. Video surveillance and storage on the cloud has several factors working in its favor—one of the most crucial being that it “reduces the amount of technical resources required to maintain a system while streamlining the security operations in a centralized IT data center,” which allows companies to improve operationally efficiency.

The report cites three presiding models shaping the market: The first is tailored to physical security companies who “prefer storage and retrieval of the video through the cloud, which would require no capital investment in the equipment,” according to the report.

The second model is predicated on cloud services in the form of a private network infrastructure that does not rely on the “need to transfer the whole video into the cloud,” the report said. The third is based on remote monitoring applications that rely on servers and storage on the back end, a video system infrastructure in between, and appliances and cameras on the front end.

The report cited IT cost containment by major corporations, the emergence of data centers and the need for centralized data management as among the key drivers of the VSaaS market over the forecast period. The phenomenon widely known as the Internet of Things is also expected to play a role in the expansion of the market across its many applications in the commercial, institutional, infrastructural, industrial and residential sectors. Edge storage adoption and mobile device access are expected to be key market enablers, according to the report.

Factors that could restrict growth include “bandwidth and corporate protocols, network security and high infrastructure cost,” the report noted.