GEC NEWS WIREFadi Kanafani, Regional Director Middle East & Africa for NetApp considers NetApp’s participation debut as a strong message to the market conveying the company’s capabilities in providing strong physical security solutions. “We want to reinforce our position in the market showing that NetApp is a very strong player when it comes to physical security and has very rich offerings with its tech partners like Bosch, Milestone, Ipsotek, and videoNEXT and show that we not only play on premise but we also have cloud solutions that can support video surveillance, access control etc.
Market research shows that demand for security cameras in the Middle East is continuously growing, consequently boosting demand for data storage in the surveillance market. In the UAE, video surveillance spending could reach USD 197.8 million by 2021. The GCC video surveillance storage market is seen to expand at an annual growth rate of over 8.5 per cent from 2017 to 2023. However, capturing and retaining data from security cameras pose greater difficulty as higher resolutions are needed and retaining images for longer periods could slow video recall performance. The increased demand for surveillance infrastructures also calls for bigger video storage capacity.
Speaking about inducing simplicity into the solutions offered, Fadi says NetApp has addressed these concerns by providing a complete line of external storage systems, which can deliver volume, speed, reliability and stability. The company expects its E-Series solution to meet the growing demand from customers seeking more flexibility in their data management requirements. The technology is designed to meet the bandwidth-intensive streaming requirements of next-generation security cameras.
NetApp is also making sure that their ecosystem partners are up to date with the latest offerings and are empowered to take their solutions to the market. Fastlane is NetApp university’s authorized training center. “Through Fastlane, we offer certification programs to enable the channel partners. We have also realized that partners that deliver solutions around physical security are different from those offering data center solutions. So, there are different kind of training programs for different ecosystem partners.”
Fadi believes that the emerging technologies in security have been successful in bridging the gap between the public and the private sector. The emergence of smart cities and smart organizations have created a set of standards and norms that both the private and public sector have to follow. “The private sectors need to adhere to the compliances and standards set by the government bodies like the ministry of interior, municipalities etc. As we always say, security is a shared responsibility and we can see the government organizations taking some active steps towards setting necessary regulations.”
During Intersec 2018 NetApp also featured a range of new data storage solutions for enterprises such as the new FlexPod SF, the world’s first enterprise-scale hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) solution built on the innovative SolidFire all-flash technology, and the ONTAP 9.3 data management software, which makes performance easier with Adaptive Quality of Service (QoS) and enhances security and compliance for enterprises
