Understanding the Financial Total Cost of Ownership for Data Analytics and Surveillance
As customers look to increase the amount of surveillance collected to drive more informed business, operational and security decisions, the cost of deploying more cameras – as well as the cost associated with storing this data – increases.
It is estimated that organizations and agencies across the globe will continue to deploy solutions at a rapid rate. Therefore, organizations and stakeholders must consider the total cost of ownership of a surveillance system, as well as the associated storage requirements at the time of purchase.
The industry focuses too much on up-front capital costs and can tend to ignore the rest.
In the current customer environment, the total cost of ownership for surveillance systems, can be broken down into these main areas:
- Hardware and software
- Installation
- Operations and administration
- End-user productivity
- Cost of Loss
Saving Costs can be distributed differently.
- IP-based systems cameras have a lower total cost of ownership than corresponding analog based systems
- Buy bandwidth-efficient cameras to reduce ongoing network costs
- Use fewer VMS servers to save time and rack space.
- Make use of Data Centre Cloud based storage solutions.
- Fixed Operational leasing over time periods 24, 36, 60 months with technology refreshes
What are some of the core financial factors to consider when determining TCO?
To accurately consider TCO the initial expenditures costs for hardware, software, design and installation must be determined. These are in most cases always Capex driven.
Added ongoing costs including operational, maintenance, and replacement costs over the time period must be added to this initial expenditure.
It’s pretty easy to look at the initial costs of purchasing the software, the hardware, and the installation.
What is often not considered in the analysis of the initial expenditures is the design time from staff, the initial setup and installation of computer equipment by the IT team, the time needed to cybersecure the initial installation, the security configurations needed (firewalls), Antivirus software, and the physical space needed.
What is often not considered in the ongoing costs, but must be included to do a proper analysis are items such as
- Electricity
- network bandwidth for remote access
- IT time to maintain the OS on computers (both servers and clients)
- IT Time for video software upgrades
- computer backups
- Cybersecurity reviews and checks
- Camera maintenance and replacement
- Disk drive replacements (MTBF fail per year)
- On-going training costs
- Video retrieval costs for third parties
- Indirect labour costs
- Travel time to perform maintenance
- Travel time to restart cameras
- Management time
- Alerting systems for monitoring the systems operation.
