Public Safety in the Cloud
I’ve recently read an article on the importance and utility of cloud in several industries: education, marketing companies, online entertainment, healthcare, information technology, finance and banking, telecommunication, hospitality, start-ups and security. I have no doubt that cloud computing apps and services can be of use in every single domain and business. In fact, cloud computing is widespread in many industries and in older articles I have touched on the benefits for some of them such as: travel and accommodation, healthcare, energy and utility. But the list of industries that stand to gain from adopting cloud computing is much longer – and today I will discuss how public safety can benefit from cloud computing.
Here are some examples of the types of documents that Public Safety could benefit by using the cloud:
- audio/ video recordings
- health records
- management system records
- sharing documents
- sensor data
The greatest benefit of cloud computing is sharing resources, whether we talk about documents, video recordings or health records. It is very efficient and cost effective for public safety entities because they do not need to invest in their own dedicated hardware and all of the associated costs of maintaining those systems.
Interagency Integration and Intersystem Interfaces are also extremely important. Public safety apps are interconnected to inter-agency, regional, state, and national systems and databases. With new data sources and apps available, reducing the investments required over the entire user population is now possible.
SaaS. Each tenant’s user experience is identical to having a dedicated system and not a shared one. Multi-tenant SaaS apps run on shared infrastructure – this means that cost of deploying an additional customer is much lower.
Public Connectivity. Citizens often adopt public-facing collaborative applications and costs and complexity to connect agencies and responders are reduced when agencies use shared multi-tenant online systems.
There are always challenges in adopting new technology, but the cloud now gives us new options and enables us access to web-based, efficient solutions for public safety.
Photo source: https://www.sxc.hu/photo/1384549
