A secure cloud for Canada’s public safety sector
I recently spoke at the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP) Information & Communication Technology Workshop and was pleased to see the tremendous interest in moving to the cloud.
While participating on a panel, we polled the audience of 150 law enforcement IT administrators and were surprised to learn that they spend a significant amount of their time, approximately 80 percent, maintaining legacy systems. That leaves just 20 percent of their time to focus on developing innovations that could move the public safety sector forward.
The problem is that most Canadian public safety agencies are operating completely on-premises—an expensive proposition, especially at a time when the growing use of police video and data is increasing their need for storage and compute power. By moving some or all of their workloads to the cloud, public safety agencies can enlarge their capacity without the capital expense of expanding their on-premises datacenters. They can also reduce the time spent maintaining their infrastructures, freeing up valuable time to develop robust mobile applications that improve insight in the field.
Canadian law enforcement officials understand these benefits. And with Microsoft soon to add its first two Canadian datacenters in Toronto and Quebec City, they will be able to tap into the Microsoft cloud without the data sovereignty issues that were an obstacle in the past. Yet to fully embrace the cloud, many officials are looking toward the national government to establish uniform regulations that guide cloud adoption. Just as in the United States, where the FBI has established the Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) security policy for the transmission and storage of criminal information in the cloud, Canadian public safety officials want to develop national cloud security standards.
Microsoft welcomes the opportunity to partner with the Canadian public safety sector as it tackles this important issue. We have a long-standing commitment to the highest standards of cloud security, privacy, transparency, and compliance through our trusted cloud initiative. We’ve gone through a vigorous process to embed security and privacy into the development of our Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform. We know how to keep public safety data secure and private—as well as the need for the public safety sector to retain ownership and control of their data. And we’ve met stringent security requirements in other major markets, including the United Kingdom, Singapore, Australia, and the US.
With our vigorous commitment to cloud-based security, we are well positioned to work with Canadian public safety agencies as they move to the cloud. And as the cloud security discussion gets under way, we hope to serve as a trusted advisor. To learn more, please see our Microsoft Azure Trust Center webpage along with requesting one of our trials: Azure Government Trial, Office 365 Government Trial.
