Key Technology Trends of 2022

♦ Key technology trends of 2022 that are likely to impact on the electronic security industry and its suppliers, integrators and end users make an interesting study.

Let’s cast the net wider than just analytics, a trend we’ve droned on about for years, which is yet to fully emerge into the operational spotlight. There are some interesting social and operational trends out there, too.

Things we think will impact the electronic security industry include battery technology. Enhancements here will impact on electrical hand tools but the biggest impact will be offering remote nodes that require no wiring and will report over whatever wireless is best and cheapest.

Face time – no, not FaceTime, face time. It’s taking a while to build, but there is a growing appetite to get face time with customers and suppliers and to touch technology, rather than sitting behind a workstation doing Zoom. It’s true that Zoom/etc works great when there’s no other way, but if you want your brain’s creativity centres to sparkle, only human interaction will do.

Remote learning has clearly arrived and educators will be looking to enliven the process – this will impact training and demo technology, especially when it comes to investment in areas like AR and VR.

Onshoring of manufacture – this will have more impact on the way the incumbents respond to a generally wishful trend, rather than a sudden reversal of 4-5 decades of offshore manufacturing. We’ll see more tight local partnerships, more open-ness and more community spirit from overseas makers, no matter where those manufacturers hail from.

Computer power – this is an interesting one. We’ll see better and more powerful computers, tablets and smart devices. We could see more powerful camera engines and more capable expressions of smart automation, thanks to enhanced chips. This trend will be offset by the increased processing demand of analytics in everything. More powerful computers are likely to have most impact in speeding up cloud, in our opinion.

Tech shortcuts driven by faster processing, more evolved firmware, shaved production, etc. This isn’t a trend anyone is talking about but it’s happening. Think fake 4K cameras, plastic lenses, devices of all kinds with their substance pared away in the name of clawing back some post-COVID margin, notwithstanding that the electronic security industry powered through pandemic. Integrators and users need to ensure hardware quality stays high.

Bad management and bad planning being blamed on ‘supply chain issues’. The key here is making sure your business is not one of the ones that blames all its mistakes on the opaque boogie of supply chain issues. There are issues but few that can’t be managed. Find new suppliers, carry sensible levels of stock, and make sure you communicate challenges to customers in advance. Don’t allow staff down the line to roll out this excuse unless it’s true.

Another trend we see is pandemic brain fog – we’re all a bit jaded and need geeing up. Post-pandemic short cuts are likely to be rife. Expect to see rush jobs, falls in design quality, square pegs in rounds holes and more. From the point of view of suppliers and integrators, all this opens opportunities for providers of quality – when others are struggling, be your best.

Cloud video and access control solutions – yeah, yeah, boring. We’ve been talking about cloud for years. But we’ve not seen newbie cloud providers jag multi-million-dollar enterprise CCTV contracts from under the noses of traditional players, have we? What’s interesting with cloud is that it’s mature and it’s already on the sites of many users infused with the dynamism of digital transition. Given this appetite, reliable, clever cloud driven by thoughtful integrators is likely to be key.

Integration through partnerships. Let’s stop pretending there’s going to be some sort of fully open standard around which the future of security electronics will revolve. Instead, we’ll see a massive expansion of technological partnerships between like-minded companies with financially complementary business models.

Will there be over-arching management solutions that bring together multifarious systems via a single workstation with a route directory as deep as Mponeng Gold Mine? Sure. But make sure if you go down this path you visit a user with the application you want already running. Don’t visit for an hour – spend a day. And send an engineer and a software guy so you can get your team across the backend.

Something that saw us spit our Special K across the breakfast bar the other day was the assertion “6G is on the horizon”. That’s true if you’re the operator of a radar station in central Australia but otherwise the notion 6G will impact on 2022 is the stuff of dreams.

Conversely, 5G is out there and growing towards carrying over 25 per cent of all global traffic by 2025, but getting dependably fast service 5G-grade performance 24/7 can be hit-miss in Australian cities. Complicating matters, the ongoing roll-out will expand 5G in lockstep with contention from a growing subscriber base. For security people, 5G will enhance metropolitan cloud applications, as well as leading to more affordable 4G allowing engineers to drive the integration of remote locations into enterprise cloud.

Very smart sensors – that’s a yes if it’s the latest Halo gear and a guarded no for most everything else that’s not actually doing new things in ever more clever ways. Something we could see with sensors is better battery technology giving longer life with more polling. We may also see longer range wireless devices operating in cleaner and more reliable bandwidths, but it’s hard to sing and dance about this, given the rising RF noise floor is what’s driving the shift.

We think there will be an increasing conception of sensors/inputs, analytics and data analysis as an end-to-end solution – people in less interesting industries call this datafication. Regardless, security solutions will become increasingly proactive and predictive based on analysis and reporting of inputs.

There are plenty of pundits going on about machine vision and video analytics in 2022 like they just heard of it. From the point of view of security people, the trend towards liberation of situational awareness and investigative detail is going to continue. Hopefully, this trend will also be towards specifications which incorporate realistic operational goals, but we can’t guarantee that.

Talking about machine vision, we think virtual reality is something that might continue to emerge from the games room. Young people seem to be getting into VR and it’s great to see kids staring at screens finally standing up. For security people, VR has relevance as a function of remote management, but the biggest use case is likely to be training, where big groups can get field experience from anywhere in the world.

Another trend we like is geospatial intelligence. Perhaps we like it because our manufacturers and end users are already into it – building maps that incorporate system components and details of the real world, including landforms, streets, infrastructure and more. Stuff like this is open ended in terms of what can be done and how it will benefit users.

AI is trending again in 2022 – we all know what it does and doesn’t do. Perhaps the biggest deal is it’s growth in the consumer mind – that acceptance and familiarity is likely to continue increasing user appetite for AI. For security people, the big trend is going to be finding ways to ensure user expectations remain realistic without losing business to organisations prepared to over-promise. For integrators, a key trend needs to be employing team members whose role it is to commission and deliver functioning AI capabilities with measurable return on investment.

Stuff at the edge – this is likely to be another trend, in our opinion. It might be an AI-empowered camera, or an edge network device bringing a cluster of remote devices into an enterprise solution. Is this edge computing – well, not as IT people know it, but there’s greater capability when it comes to smart edge devices. The key will be finding manufacturers and developers brave enough to invest in it.

Cybersecurity continues to be an evolving trend – it’s been driven ahead by evolving threats and digital transition. A continuing trend will be capable cyber defences in physical and network security solutions, secure data centres protected by AI sentries and market openness to notions like blockchain, which verify transmissions from end-to-end.

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