IN THE BOARDROOM™ with...

Mr. Graham Porter
Business Development Director EMEA
Dell EMC Surveillance and Security

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Thank you for joining us again today Graham. The constant threat environment continues unabated globally. Please update us on the security and surveillance climate in the EMEA region at this time.

Graham Porter: We are seeing changes driven by mutations in the nature of terrorist threats and these have created needs for Critical Infrastructure property owners and operators to align their protection and safety regimes with advice received from two main sources – the Police and liability insurers/re-assurance organisations.

In Europe, we are seeing the movement from asset protection in transportation venues toward the need to protect un-checked crowds in areas such as Check-in areas of airports, luggage drop-off zones and assembly points around terminal buildings. The reasons are clear – historically, the security effort was aimed toward stopping criminal damage against airplanes and airport machinery on the part of the transport operators, and to stop theft and fraud in the cases of in-terminal retailers.

The need to identify persons of interest approaching and moving around airport and transportation facilities has become a priority need sought after by operators increasingly since the attacks at Zavantem, Belgium which was a terrorist crime perpetrated against crowds of innocent airport travelers in an area PRIOR to the areas where passengers passed through security equipment and search areas.

Historically, protecting planes and stopping luggage theft was a priority – and now the effort is expanded toward increasing the safety of the airplane travelers and luggage owners instead.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com:  How does the politics of security fit into this discussion?

Graham Porter: Airports and international transportation hubs, including ports of entry, may be run by privatized corporate bodies on a concession contract basis, but they are nearly always government owned, built and regulated. In effect, mass transport hubs are immigration entry points served by public transport. The first obligation of any Government is to cover the safety and security needs of its citizen body and legitimate visitors.

Integral to guaranteeing traveler safely, is the need to track and centrally reconcile international travelers, including visitors moving through land-based countries. An example would be Germany, where there are requirements to track visitors entering Germany at Munich, but travelling through Germany and exiting through, say, Hamburg in the North. In large countries, where ports and entry points have always kept their own data pools and recorded visitors and leavers on a regional basis, there are now new technology requirements to centralize access to visitor-leaver identity data so that country-wide data management can be achieved.

New European data and privacy laws effective from May 2018 (GDPR) have caused IT and data managers to review their policies and practices effectively in order to protect the rights of any citizen to ‘disappear’ is balanced with the security requirement which has always been placed on Operators to know who it using their facility and to ensure they secure their crowded spaces. There is no doubt an increase in the cost of providing the safe traveler environment and the cost is seen usually as either an Airport Levy or local tax – which is seen as making transportation facility access more costly to travelers.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com:  The mass adoption of biometric authentication seems to be growing at a rapid pace. Are you seeing the same trend in EMEA countries?

Graham Porter: Identity management tools have become the new security facts working in the airport space. Once science fiction, ID management software and data management tools to identify and track individuals and behaviours has become integral to providing a ‘safe-traveler-experience’ which is at the front of airport security. The security itself has become a marketing positive for Operators.

An example of this is Munich Airport in Germany – the first European SkyTrax 5-Star award of any European airport, and Munich is in good company with other major international airports who compete to advertise passenger safety to attract traveler patronage. The Munich Flughaven Global (Munich World Airport) web-site shows their 5-star award sticker prominently displayed because it is seen as an endorsement point in the competitive space of attracting traveler footfall.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: We understand that Dell EMC participated in the recent  MILIPOL PARIS 2017 . Care to share with us any highlights?

Graham Porter: Indeed we did, and the exhibition took place in Paris, France and was attended by major integrators and government bodies exploring and supporting Police and protection services.

The exhibition was well-attended and we spent time in the ATOS exhibition booth where we met specialists in the field of ID management and watched a 30 minute presentation given to Dr. Otto Schoeder, First Minister for Germany with special responsibility for immigration, federal Police and border management. Once upon a time, one would never have seen a government minister in an exhibition environment, but the sheer pace of technology adoption, pressing need to provide citizen safety and the quality of the ATOS solutions exhibition space attracted security stakeholders from inside and outside the industry.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: We read with great interest about the Dell EMC global alliance with ATOS.  Please give us an overview of the solutions that this partnership delivers to the market. Any success stories you’d like to talk about?

Graham Porter: The headline solution provided by Dell EMC and brought to market by ATOS is the Body Worn Camera archiving and infrastructure for IT transformation delivered to the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) based in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

As the British part of Ireland that has seen local and international terrorism in its territory, the Police have been equipped with Body Worn Video cameras which archive activity and interactions between police officers and the citizen body in high definition real time video. The storage requirement behind the video and evidence management technology has become a major collaborative project between Dell EMC and ATOS Consulting leading to improvements and cost reduction in the Police estate in the province of Northern Ireland. 

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Congratulations on the Munich Airport success story. In August last year, you shared with us that,

“The Munich Airport system is a paradigm among airport security systems. It was designed around a single centralized and virtual data archiving system, accessible to anyone with permission anywhere on the airport network, and uses behavioral analytics to trigger alarm, camera management (zoom into the picture, follow a suspect, increase image resolution etc.) thereby reducing the number and scope of ‘People-Watching-Cameras’ and providing a massive saving for the airport operators. The system installed was placed by a Dell EMC partner in a public competitive RFP, so value as well as functional excellence was a determinant of the solution choice. We are given permission to reference this system and use it for show-&-tell visits and in our sales meetings with new and existing Customers. The airport has since expanded the system beyond the original scope and size of the original purchased hardware, emphasizing their commitment to our solution and their happiness with it.”  

Any additional updates you’d like to share with us? 

Graham Porter: Munich Airport has since extended its archiving and data management capability with further purchases of Dell EMC hardware, and we have seen interesting tests for analytic software to identify fence-line intrusion and to use their security camera system to differentiate between human and animal life forms in the outlying areas of the airport security fencing. The airport is an on-going project and subject to continuous improvement, review and innovation.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com:  Thanks again for joining us today Graham. Any other subjects you’d like to discuss?

Graham Porter: I would thank you for your interest and focus on security matters and for the attention you as SecuritySolutionsWatch are bringing which promotes understanding and information exchange in a fast moving technology area where mistakes appear on the front pages of our newspapers, rather than the middle pages, unfortunately.

We invite our readers to also read our earlier interview with Graham Porter which follows below.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Thank you for joining us today, Graham. It’s truly an honor to speak with a former member of the Royal Navy and co-creator of the aaS solution incorporating cloud solutions for Public Sector and major enterprise customers. Before discussing recent trends and developments, please elaborate for us about your background.

Graham Porter:  In security, a mixed background appears helpful.           

Originally an electrical engineer, I was tasked with management of HM Trident Submarine Fleet electronic security originally to cover a G8 Security Conference, but thereafter to modernize the systems and processes around securing the naval base which housed the GB atomic weapons arsenal and associated accessories.

For 7yrs+ I worked with Cisco as part of their Emerging Technology team, based in London.

Prior to that, I attach a BIO for your further interest.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: In our recent chat with Ken Mills, General Manager, Dell EMC, Surveillance and Security we talked about how Dell EMC is today “#1 In Everything, All in 1 Place” and making the world safer.  Your thoughts, Graham, on this topic?

Graham Porter:  The security industry generally, and in particular the IT parts of the Security solutions provider space, have ownership of the technologies to deliver advanced search, security and increased functionality to the old-fashioned archiving functions which stand behind security systems.

The troubling thing was that we were aware of the ‘people of interest’ for weeks prior to recent terrorist incidents, and the data was part of an unsearched and unstructured body of archived material, yet to be reviewed.

Dell EMC has market leading tools for identifying and managing data – Gartner puts Dell EMC at the very top of its class under ‘Ability to Execute’ because of Dell EMC’s ability to take technology solutions in this space, which means we take the technology out of the lab and off the PowerPoint and apply it in real world operating environments.

The improved capability of the new Dell EMC corporate environment, has improved the scope and depth of the solution set available to Dell EMC Customers and provides an environment in which a solution can be delivered throughout the whole IT estate, from rugged laptop, workstation PC, operator workstation, to storage, and even including Cloud application management. This reduced Customer risks in design, compatibility and support in often overlooked area such as version control and post-sale engineering resources, which are important in establishing class-leading value propositions to Customers with systems in production.

The Data Storage budgets for surveillance systems are growing at 3x the speed of the regular IT Industry spend, making it a $5 Billion Total Addressable Market by 2019, growing at 20% per year just for the storage parts of the surveillance systems.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Dell EMC brand recognition is certainly second to none. What is your perspective Graham regarding the unique value proposition that Dell EMC brings to the table?

Graham Porter: The main differentiators I would call out covers 3 areas:

There are basis needs that Dell EMC solutions deliver intuitively – solutions that are Scalable, protect against Data Loss and provide a platform for Analytics. Additionally, it is crucial to understand the benefits of taking early project advice from Dell EMC……
Validation:

Dell EMC owns the industry’s best architectural validation testing facility, capable of providing functional and operational ‘test-to-fail’ for a 5,000 camera system under one roof. This allows Dell EMC to create Whitepapers covering all the major Video Management Systems (VMS) and provide the industry with authoritative guidance beyond the normal speeds-&-feeds testing which used to happen post-purchase in most cases. This allows Dell EMC to de-risk the design and implementation risks associated with surveillance systems and saves Customers reputation and investments when the lab either passes or fails a design.

The 2nd area is Ability to Execute.

The graph below shows two items of interest – from the ISG 2016 Report.

EMC and then Dell EMC has been leading the market in NAS storage for surveillance solutions since 2010. It is not simply a recent fashion within Dell EMC, rather it is a long investment in surveillance as a storage Use Case which has created a market leading approach to the needs of an industry designed to increase safety for all citizens.

The 2010 numbers below are almost unchanged YoY to show a market share between 28% and 32.5% market share 2010-2016.

Gartner Magic Quadrant is shown below, demonstrating that EMC, (now Dell EMC), leads in Ability to Execute which means that our corporate ability to take technology off the exhibition floor and PPT chart and apply it into real world Customer environments is unequalled.

3.  The 3rd area is completeness of solution.

The new structure provided by Dell EMC allows our practitioners to deliver a Dell EMC solution across all technology areas.

In a surveillance environment, the expense and technology risk has a centre of gravity in Networks, Storage and Cyber Security.

These risk areas of risk and expense exist regardless of the type of cameras chosen, and the camera system management software operated by the Customer.

Dell EMC has a portfolio of network switches, storage solutions and cyber tools to allow designing out of all associated risks, and to allow system designers to concentrate on their CCTV pictures and security requirements undistracted by a technology trip-hazard created by network design, storage requirements and cyber threats.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Today’s constant threat environment has resulted in unprecedented security challenges. Data is flowing in from a growing multitude of sources: body cameras, UAV’s, in-car video, CCTV, and satellites, just to name a few; and the mission is always to make better decision faster. What trends are you seeing, Graham, with your customers as they strive to achieve greater operational automation? Please to walk us through Dell EMC storage, cloud, network, big data and analytics solutions.

Graham Porter:  We are seeing a definite direction of travel in system architecture, away from distributed in-chassis storage and towards centralized and virtualized hardware solutions, and even on towards Cloud storage where data not subject to immediate recall can be stored without the cost and support for an on-premises data centre.

We are seeing the need to reduce the manpower associated with system operations – for instance, a major EU airport we implemented in the last year, has applied analytics to reduce its manpower costs to allow 4,500 camera system to be managed effectively from 4 Operator Workstations – saving a weekly shift-based workforce for an additional 11 full-time security monitoring staff working 24/7. In that case, Europe’s only 5-Star airport, analytics have revolutionized the operational cost and scope of the CCTV for the airport without compromising on the system effectiveness. A year ago, this would not have been possible, because the technology was not trusted sufficiently to allow such innovations to be implemented.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Let’s drill down into some Dell EMC key target markets and success stories. Can we begin with Airports? Please give us an overview of the solution Dell EMC provided for the Munich Airport. Any other “wins” in the airport/infrastructure space you care to mention?

Graham Porter: The Munich Airport system is a paradigm among airport security systems. It was designed around a single centralized and virtual data archiving system, accessible to anyone with permission anywhere on the airport network, and uses behavioral analytics to trigger alarm, camera management (zoom into the picture, follow a suspect, increase image resolution etc.) thereby reducing the number and scope of ‘People-Watching-Cameras’ and providing a massive saving for the airport operators. The system installed was placed by a Dell EMC partner in a public competitive RFP, so value as well as functional excellence was a determinant of the solution choice. We are given permission to reference this system and use it for show-&-tell visits and in our sales meetings with new and existing Customers. The airport has since expanded the system beyond the original scope and size of the original purchased hardware, emphasizing their commitment to our solution and their happiness with it.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: We understand that the nuclear market and law enforcement space are also key target markets for Dell EMC. Please tell us more.

Graham Porter: In the current climate securing national and critical infrastructure (NCI) is an obligation facing all facility operators for the Nuclear and NCI industries. Security water supplies, power utilities, and nuclear facilities is a security-based nightmare given the terrorism, protect activity and damage potential these facilities face. The UK has a major reactor site in Cumbria, operated by British Nuclear Fuels Ltd for the British Government. To secure that site, our Alliance Partner ATOS, working with security specialist Partner Chubb Systems, centralized and modernized the whole site security system based on Video Surveillance, Isilon storage and fence alarms. The work was successful, and led to an industry reference which also gained us contracts to secure German reactor sites with the same Dell EMC centralized storage solution.

In terms of law enforcement – Dell EMC storage solutions sit behind Body Worn Video and main police operated CCTV systems in 28 of the 43 Police Forces in the UK&I. Last quarter, the Police Service of Northern Ireland became the latest unitary Police Force to adopt a Dell EMC solution, again designed and installed by ATOS, our Alliance Partner.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Any other key target markets or success stories you’d like to discuss?

Graham Porter:   I would share that our focus is mainly Public Space, Police and Evidence – but also Transportation. Dell EMC has a team of solution design professionals dedicated to providing class-leading solutions with the aim to provide a safe passenger experience in airports, ports, railways and roads environments alike. Integrated transport systems, which transition passengers from Boats, trains, airplanes and roads to complete complex journeys are becoming a security and network solutions challenge which Dell EMC has established leadership in meeting. Recent examples include Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) and Nexus Rail (Northeast England) and our on-going advisory and design projects with Network Rail and Transport for London (TfL) are providing sharing opportunities for our teams working alongside Customer teams to deliver the best, safest and most efficient travel experience our technology can enable.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: We read with great interest this recent announcement “Atos and Dell EMC Join Forces to Address the Growing Internet of Things Market”. Care to elaborate? Any other partnerships you would like to profile?

Graham Porter:  The Alliance with ATOS has been instrumental in enabling to uptake of complex technology solutions in the travel and Police space. These systems are not an appliance-based solution environment, where a simple box can answer the operational needs of the Customer, in most cases, bespoke development and deep understanding of the voice of the Customer has been required to deliver a ‘Right-First-Time’ security solution. We remain appreciative of the skills deployed by ATOS in skilling up, and enabling Customer’s-own staff to support and maintain complex solutions in a mission critical environment.

The collaboration with Chubb Systems, specialist in security implementation for cameras, access control and command and control rooms, has allowed our sales teams to complete their offering from one sheet of glass and changed our approach to projects to the benefit of our Customers.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Please tell us about how Dell EMC Surveillance Partner Validations assure successful implementation and what’s behind one of Dell EMC’s new slogans “don’t let hero numbers make you a villain”.

Graham Porter: When I first joined EMC, (prior to it becoming Dell EMC), no-one mentioned the EMC Labs. The question ‘How do you know it will work….’ was met with the news that solutions have been accredited and passed through the EMC Labs. Dell EMC has a 5,000 camera functional testing laboratory in Durham, N.C., as well as a satellite test Lab in Bangalore, India. These facilities give Dell EMC the unique capability of showing a Customer what they are buying prior to purchase – not in the form of a scaled-down PoC or test rig, but scaled up to include realistic ‘airport-sized’ camera numbers, with real world storage attached and the ability to design in applications, test the effects of network latency, alarm flooding, multi-user access, video transport across the network and other ‘gotchas’ which can bring a simple security system design in question.

Our colleagues can ‘test-to-fail’ any architecture and VMS, to re-risk design and implementation of a Customer’s security system alongside our enterprise storage solutions.

My colleague, Frank McCarthy, Dell EMC, Global Chief Technology Officer, and Dell EMC Director of Labs, is someone deep in surveillance industry knowledge and experience, and as a dedicated IT professional, his team provides many resources,  such as: Whitepapers, designs and validations needed to control risks involved in technology migration. 

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Thanks again for joining us today, Graham. Are there any other subjects you'd like to highlight?

Graham Porter: Our intention always is to make the Customer adoption of our technology smooth and helpful. It is not technology for technology-sake, it is measurable improvement in the Customer’s business we aim to deliver and we do business more for what we know about our Customers, than for what they know about us.

It is a constant learning environment, and we move forward daily, improving and working to deliver better, more efficient and more durable solutions in the mission critical Customer space.