As the amount of video data is growing in the video surveillance systems, the suitable architecture is needed to support the requirements for big data application in video surveillance systems to deal with the structured and unstructured data, and to enhance the efficiency for the huge data retrieval and the data mining across time and space range. This Recommendation is to define an architecture for big data application in video surveillance systems, including the functional architecture and reference points. This Recommendation is based on Recommendation ITU-T F.743.7 "Requirements for big data-enhanced visual surveillance services".