Securing the U.S. border is a heated topic and in this intense political year, there’s no shortage of opinions. But no matter which side of the “fence” you are on, there’s a revolution in security happening and it has nothing to do with brick and mortar and everything to do with the virtual wall of data that is changing the whole debate. The stats to back it up are anything but virtual. Advanced data analytics has improved the quality and speed of decision-making for 93 percent of federal government respondents with big data projects underway, according to a 2015 survey by Unisys Corporation. Simply put, integrated technology systems can capture and analyze data so effectively it becomes actionable information, allowing border control agents to be proactive like never before. And that’s not political rhetoric.
Arizona’s border surveillance plan is proof positive that there’s a new approach to this lingering debate. The plan includes 52, 80-foot-tall surveillance towers, with radar and day-and-night cameras that send real-time video footage to a border patrol command post. The plan is expected to give agents 90% situational awareness about what is really happening on the border.
With plans such as this, there’s a significant amount of information available from video surveillance and disparate sources such as social media, weather conditions, transit maps and much more. Sensors and higher-definition cameras and more powerful computer processing technology give agents better intelligence – but there’s a catch. Intelligence comes only if the information can be analyzed in real-time, making it applicable and practical. Hitachi Visualization (HV) is the first truly integrated end-to-end solution built for public safety. HV gathers massive amounts of information from this wide range of unconnected sources and makes sense of the chaos, giving agents unprecedented insight previously undetected in the sea of data.
When you examine the power of data, whether it’s analyzing video surveillance, or dissecting massive quantities of data to connect names, identities and activities to criminals, like ViON is enabling with our DataAdapt Threat Detect solution, now you are breaking down the walls to achieving greater security, not putting them up.