Big data: The next frontier for public safety
The worldwide research firm McKinsey Global Institute has called big data “the next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity.” And that’s as true for the public safety sector as it is for commercial businesses. From police departments to criminal investigative teams to disaster relief organizations, many public safety organizations are harnessing big data to strengthen their decision making and efficiency—and they’re achieving impressive results.
Microsoft SQL Server can help public safety agencies collect, manage, and analyze large volumes of data, turning this information into actionable insights that inform their work. By putting SQL Server to strategic use, public safety organizations can dramatically improve their outcomes. Consider the following examples:
Create safer cities
Located on the west coast of India, the City of Surat, the world’s fourth-fastest-growing city, created a new video-enabled command center that is helping Surat’s small police force maintain safety as population increases. The command center includes a 280-square-foot video wall monitor that streams real-time video feeds from critical public locations and major traffic junctions around Surat, along with the city’s entry and exit points. To manage the video footage, the city built a datacenter on SQL Server that can scale to accommodate 5,000 cameras and integrate with state and national security systems. Since implementing the command center, city officials have witnessed a 27 percent reduction in crime in the surveillance zones. Says Rakesh Asthana, Commissioner of Police for the City of Surat: “Our biggest shortcoming in recent years has been a lack of personnel. So we feel it is important to maximize our use of technology to bridge the gap between the number of police officers and the growth of the city.”
Reduce global warming
National Air Traffic Services or NATS, which manages all flights in the United Kingdom controlled airspace including traffic for the busy Heathrow Airport, wanted to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that lead to global warming by improving flight efficiency. The organization had been performing sophisticated analytics on flight data across UK airspace for more than 20 years, but had hit a wall as the volume and complexity of the data it collected continued to increase. Using SQL Server, Microsoft Azure, and other Microsoft technology, NATS has powered through four years of data in less than one month, helping the company to reach its goal of reducing CO2 emissions by 2020. Says Ray Lim, NATS Business Intelligence Manager, “With our SQL Server solution, we can analyze a flight plan versus a flight’s actual trajectory and accurately model fuel usage and CO2 output to understand the effect of network influences and operational decisions. This enables us to strategically manage the air traffic operation with more information to hand, and have more confidence in our decisions.”
Enhance disaster recovery efforts
SQL Server is helping the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) with recovery and economic development in the aftermath of natural disasters such as the Nepal earthquake. In the aftermath of the earthquake, UNDP teamed up with the Microsoft Innovations Center in Nepal to create a mobile application that uses SQL Server as its back-end database to coordinate debris removal. The app records data on damaged structures, tracks the attendance and pay of workers removing debris, incorporates survey information from communities affected by the earthquake, and turns analytical data into progress reports. In the future, the UNDP plans to use the app to track relief efforts on a broader scale. “With all of that information already in the cloud, we have a helicopter view on what is happening and where, and whether people in need of aid were reached and supported,” says Jamie McGoldrick, the UN Resident Coordinator in Nepal.
These are just a few of the ways in which SQL Server can dramatically improve public safety efforts. And with the recent announcement of the SQL Server 2016 release public safety organizations will soon be able to take advantage of faster transactions and queries, improved analytics, and new hybrid cloud scenarios. To learn more, please see the Microsoft SQL Server 2016 webpage.
