VIEVU, Microsoft partner to develop CJIS-compliant cloud platform for police video

With the proliferation of body-worn surveillance solutions throughout the law enforcement and public safety community over the past several years, there has also been a subsequent increase in demand for solutions that help these agencies retain the massive amounts of video they are taking in on a daily basis. Storing video in the cloud would be one of the most cost-effective and efficient methods for retaining that data, however, concerns about meeting the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services strict security policies have held many agencies back from making the migration to the cloud.

VIEVU, a Seattle-based maker of body-worn cameras, recently partnered with Microsoft to develop a cloud platform built on the software giant’s Azure Government cloud to alleviate these concerns. As a result of the collaboration, VIEVU has created the first CJIS-capable version of its VERIPATROL video management solution.

“We are kind of in a very exciting time with this exploding blend of government, business and citizen video,” said Steve Lovell, president of VIEVU, which has 4,000 law enforcement customers in 16 different countries. “We are really in a digital age of documentation and our customers are shifting and the trend is shifting to cloud-based solutions and currently our software, VERIPATROL, has a couple of form factors. We can store locally, on a network or we can actually provide a client in the field so officers can view video and upload their cameras to the VERIPATROL server wirelessly. We also have key features in our software that track all activity in the software so users can’t delete any video files.”

According to Rick Zak, director of justice & public safety solutions, Microsoft State & Local Government, end users are recording and sharing much more video than they did in the past in a myriad of form factors (body-worn, in-car, etc.) and they are also upgrading from standard to high-definition video, resulting in much larger file sizes. Additionally, Zak said that an increasing number of law enforcement agencies are changing their retention policies and making them much longer than what they used to be. Instead of deleting video as soon as possible and only keeping what was necessary for critical cases, Zak said that has changed significantly in just the past year.

“If we think about more cameras recording more video that they’re keeping longer, it is having a significant impact on their ability to manage it,” explained Zak. “The typical model has been to deploy more storage in their own data center to support all of this, but the growth is outstripping that ability – they can’t buy more storage, they can’t manage more storage and they are starting to pull resources from other missions just to buy storage for the video that they are recording and now keeping.”

While law enforcement agencies have looked into the flexibility that moving to a cloud platform would give them in retaining the amount of video they want, Zak said they have been hampered by these CJIS policies, which they have to be in compliance with if they want to receive information from the FBI. Zak said that CJIS has a tremendous number of security controls that go above and beyond the types of measures typically found in other government regulations as it pertains to securing data. Microsoft has augmented its control set to accommodate these controls and worked closely with states to also comply with some other regulations set forth by CJIS such as:

• Background check requirements for any employees at a law enforcement agency that has access to the data
• Third-party auditing of the data center that is hosting the agency’s data.      

By leveraging the VERIPATROL solution on the Azure Government platform, however, law enforcement agencies can send video to the cloud in a way that supports compliance with CJIS policies, as well as solves their economic and technology problems. It wasn’t that long ago that many end users were skeptical about using the cloud, in general, but that has begun to change recently and having a CJIS-compliant solution will only aid their willingness to make the transition.

“If it were a year ago and you asked a police chief about using the cloud, the answer would have been no: ‘No, we are not going to the cloud, no, we don’t see that as part our strategy.’ If you asked that same chief today, their answer is, ‘tell me how to do it securely,’ said Zak. “Some of that is driven by necessity as video workloads just grow enormously and as other law enforcement data sets start to really grow and you start to do complex analytics against data. They are now collecting much more data than they have ever had in the past. That demand on their infrastructure has accelerated in the past year and as we’ve met with a lot of agencies, now they see a way to leverage the cloud in a way that supports their compliance with CJIS.”   

At one large city police department that Microsoft works with, Zak said that they break video retention down by the type of event recorded. For example, video can be stored under this city’s policy from as little as 90 days for a run-of-the-mill traffic stop all the way up to seven years for an incident involving officer use of force.  

Lovell believes the introduction of a CJIS-compliant cloud platform for police and other public safety agencies is only going to drive adoption of body-word video surveillance even higher than what it is today.

“We’ve been asked for years for offsite data cloud storage that actually complies with federal guidelines and even in our previous cloud solution that we had, we held back metadata and we didn’t interact with the exchange between the data, so it went directly from the customer to the cloud provider. I think one of the exciting things with the Microsoft Azure platform and this alliance that we have, is they were uniquely equipped and no other company can really offer a comprehensive commitment to security and privacy, as well as such as broad portfolio of software devices and other services that really engage the technology lifecycle.”

Zak pointed out, however, that VIEVU is in a “preview section” of the Azure Government cloud, which has not been officially launched as of yet, but is set to make its debut very soon.