Do you think like a police (or sheriff’s) department…or like a successful business?

Law enforcement agencies today are battling several fronts. Criminals, politicians, the media...and all of a sudden we’re the enemy on multiple levels. The same holds true with your budgets and technology. The go-to answer, which quite frankly gets real old real fast is: “Do more with less.” As administrators we get it. But the fact is there are a lot of things that eat away at your budget, A LOT.

In government, law enforcement especially, most things we do are because we have to, not because we want to. We were one of the last industries to stop using a typewriter! Business and corporations on the other hand are far ahead of us. Why? Because they don’t approach things like government does, they approach solutions because it makes them money by saving them money. Businesses have determined a long time ago that the longer it takes employees to do simple tasks, the more money they lose by being inefficient.

How much is your time worth?

Take the same principle to law enforcement. Don’t look at reports, evidence, CAD/RMS entries, e-mails, car/body camera operations, or other computerized tasks as tasks; look at them in dollars and cents. Look at them as your budget dollars in salary. Now of that salary, take a good look at how much you’re losing because of those tasks. Not because they have to be done, but because of how they’re done. How much salary are you spending on computers that are slow? Servers that are slow? Systems that don’t stay up? What about inability of officers in the field or at home to complete work when not inside the station? Even worse, how much do you pay an officer or a vendor to support technology that is old, resource restricted, or just “needy?”

From a budget perspective, you have two issues: The first is the money you spend on your technology. The second is the money you waste by your staff’s inefficiency using that same technology. Oddly enough, IT expenses are the easiest to reduce and control but the last place administrators look. You have to purchase cars, ammunition for qualifications, provide officers training, uniforms and equipment...the list goes on.

What if you could reduce or almost eliminate an IT budget? Only you know what you spend in your agency for that. What could you do with that money? More than you’re doing now, right?

Think: Return on investment

How is it easy? Go back to the business model. Make the thought process more in terms of “Will this give me a profitable return on my investment?” instead of “I gotta do this now?” One place agencies might find a return on investment—especially in the years to come—is in the area of cloud based solutions. CJIS-compliant cloud based solutions do exist, and they’re definitely worth a look for any law enforcement agency. Before CJIS-compliant hosting was available, agencies couldn’t leverage the massive market that businesses have been tapped into for years.

Making a case for the cloud

Why cloud technology? Because regardless of your agency’s size, you might never achieve what a cloud-based solution would give you at the prices they offer. If you duplicated a cloud environment and tried running it in-house you would still be paying more. The sheer volume of a cloud environment is what gives them the ability to offer affordable pricing.

Consider what you have in-house: Your servers, connectivity, firewalls, switches, backup products, storage, etc. Now consider the cloud: Multiple firewalls, multiple switches, multiple redundant environments, multiple internet connections, scalable storage and so on. What does that mean for you? That means for every one server you have, putting that in a cloud hosted environment means there are three or four doing the same thing. As opposed to the one firewall you have, a cloud host has at least two or three. The same goes for switches and other hardware. And the storage is infinitely scalable. That means not having to buy more of anything when you get hit with a mandate like body cameras and need more storage.

Cloud technology is proving phenomenally more efficient and more available than your in-house operation might ever be. If that wasn’t the case, it wouldn’t have survived so successfully for this long.
The average costs of hosting what you have in-house balances out after a few years, which is just in time to replace your hardware again anyway. But your savings aren’t just in removing your hardware; it’s in the efficiency you gain by having a hosted solution available 100 percent of the time to 10 percent of your staff, regardless of their location—even if you lost your headquarters due to evacuation, emergency or disaster. All you need is an internet connection and you’re back online.

What to look for

When looking for a cloud provider consider these factors:

• First and foremost, are they CJIS compliant? They either are or they aren’t.
• Second, think support. Does the provider know your technology and are they willing and able to work with your third party vendors such as CAD/RMS companies to accomplish a smooth transition? Can they provide you with round-the-clock support?
• Has the company not only been able to meet CJIS compliance, but are they committed to the IACP Guiding Principles on Cloud Computing?
• Does the company know law enforcement? Not from an “I have a friend” perspective, but actually know it. This is important because law enforcement isn’t like any other industry. It needs very special considerations and understanding. Providers who have actual “road experience” combined with their technical knowledge are far more beneficial for an agency than just knowing the technical side.

It’s time to seriously consider cloud hosted solutions to help shoulder the load of information and data. Law enforcement should not be in the IT or hardware business, and going cloud could just be the answer for your agency.

Michael Coppola is the president & C.S.O. of CJIS Solutions, a provider of CJIS compliant hosted solutions for law enforcement. He’s also the Chief of Police for the Palisades Interstate Parkway Police Department in New Jersey and has an extensive background in law enforcement and information technology.