With Cloud Storage Solutions, Law Enforcement Agencies Recall Vital Data Upon Demand

Storage is often one of the biggest motivators for moving to a hybrid cloud structure, says Ash Johnson, senior policy manager at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and co-author of a 2023 report, “Police Tech: Exploring the Opportunities and Fact-Checking the Criticisms.”

“The cloud is great for that, and cloud computing is typically more cost-effective than the alternative,” Johnson says. “When you make those storage and IT procurement cuts, you can obviously spend that money elsewhere: more officers, other types of technology.”

Law enforcement agencies with relatively small IT components might also find the monitoring and other operational assistance that providers may supply to be helpful.

“Anytime you have less hardware and more of these software cloud-based solutions involved, it makes updates a lot easier,” he says.

Law Enforcement Takes a Layered Security Approach

While the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office has traditionally had a largely on-premises architecture involving Dell PowerEdge servers and Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization, cloud-based storage plays a critical role in its disaster recovery and operational continuity plans, says Senior Department Information Systems Manager Justin Riedel.

Located in Northern California, the sheriff’s office, which previously replicated server data to servers elsewhere within its environment, now uses Microsoft Azure cloud storage capabilities, a change Riedel says was made partly in response to the natural disasters the region has experienced in recent years.

For example, during the Tubbs Fire (which burned for 123 days in 2017 and 2018, destroying more than 5,600 structures in Napa and Sonoma County, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection), service was down for one of the area’s major internet providers, he says.

Although the sheriff’s office can toggle between multiple providers, during some of the wildfire, issues affecting another provider’s cell towers meant there was no cell connectivity.

“Imagine that a giant earthquake severs the fiber-optic lines coming out of the county,” Riedel says. “We would be completely unable to get people out of our jail or send deputies to calls to evacuate people. At this stage, a hybrid environment seems like the better way to go, where you keep things on-premises and maybe secondary systems in the cloud — at least, until there’s a much more resilient fiber-optic backbone.”

RELATED: The public sector must prioritize IT readiness for natural disasters.

In addition to Microsoft Azure site recovery and backup services located in different states, some of the department’s most important data is also backed up on-premises and physically stored offline once a week.

If a ransomware attack were to occur, the sheriff’s office would “still have some good old-fashioned hard drives in a locked cabinet” to recover data from, Riedel says.

“Some of the backups are stored onsite for a short period of time and then also copied to Microsoft Azure,” he says. “That way, we can go back several weeks or months, in case we want an older copy of the server.”

Police Prioritize Internal Planning and Updates

A few years after the city of Portland, Ore., implemented the cloud-based Microsoft 365 suite approximately a decade ago, the Portland Police Bureau decided to migrate to the same platform to reduce on-premises email and other storage costs and provide more flexibility for employees, says Rick Schulte, division manager of public safety technology for the Portland Bureau of Technology Services.

“The police, in particular, are a highly mobile workforce,” he says. “For our on-prem solutions, we have offsite backup, but we didn’t have the high availability or geographic redundancy a cloud solution gives us.”

Since adding the 365 solutions, the police bureau has begun examining moving other services to the cloud. It’s currently wrapping up the installation of a cloud-based body camera system, Schulte says, and is hoping to transplant its record management system in a few months.

Some law enforcement agencies might choose to keep sensitive data on-premises because of the time and resources that shifting systems to the cloud can require, Johnson says; they may also already have the appropriate protocols in place to be compliant with provisions such as the Criminal Justice Information Services Security Policy, developed by the advisory board of the FBI’s CJIS Division to help protect criminal justice-related information throughout its lifecycle.

“Sometimes, it’s easier to transition certain systems,” Johnson says. “You might start with the easiest ones first, or just stick with a hybrid approach, where you have some transition to the cloud, and some of them not.”

The Portland Police Bureau is keeping some applications and other items on-premises, such as high-performance elements that would require a significant connectivity level. Still, its hybrid cloud configuration continues to offer convenience, Schulte says.

“In the old days, we would be on an isolated network, sitting in the office. Our police cars were on the radio system, not broadband and the internet,” he says. “Today, we have access to virtually all of our systems and applications, whether they're on- or off-prem, over a secure VPN connection that’s managed within the Portland Police Bureau.”

DIVE DEEPER: These counties upgraded their on-premises data centers.

First Responders Consider Scalability of Hybrid Cloud

The Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Office’s similarly weighs multiple considerations when deciding where to store items, Quintela says, including how available information will be.

“One of the challenges is that when you have access to the database directly, it’s easy to create transactional systems between disparate systems: We’ve got information from this one system and need to automate transferring data to another,” he says. “Whenever a product gets shifted to the cloud, if they don’t have a feature-rich API, that can be problematic and create inefficiencies for us.”

EXPLORE: Cloud optimization must remain a priority for state and local governments.

If a law enforcement agency decides to pursue a hybrid cloud strategy, infrastructure changes may be necessary to facilitate ample, secure connectivity; the Portland Police Bureau, for instance, added bandwidth and Fortinet FortiGate firewalls.

Depending on an organization’s scope, adjustments could be costly, Schulte says. He suggests carefully designing hybrid systems to scale to meet subsequent cloud activity needs. This can help position you to leverage and recoup your initial investment.

“Being able to use service providers like FirstNet, Verizon, AT&T or T-Mobile in a secure manner that meets our compliance requirements — it took a long time for us to mature enough for that,” he says. “The architecture we’re running on now has opened us up to cloud services to support 100% mobile workers from end to end. That’s one of the largest outcomes of a hybrid environment.”