In the June 2014 issue of Security Magazine there was an amazing fact: at any given time 30% of IP video networks have a problem. Especially as the need for continuous video surveillance has grown the last few years, this is not just an amazing fact but an alarming one. Of any mission-critical system I'm aware of, acceptable failure rates are expressed in fractions of a percent. Because we see it in the news so often, it is almost expected that there is video to answer the question of what happened (and sometimes, what is happening). From preventing terrorism to catching criminals to monitoring flash flood areas, video is what we rely on. How it is that reliability of IP video as a mission-critical security capability is so questionable?
