Unisys & Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center
Breakthrough: Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center Improves Officer and Citizen Safety.
Imagine it.

Enhancing officer and citizen safety while building trust among constituents –

by re-engineering the IT infrastructure to improve communications and business continuity.

Done.
By implementing a solution based on Unisys ES7000/one and SafeGuard 30m technology, the Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center created a dependable, cost-effective system that delivers real-time information to end users, supports future growth, and provides robust, reliable operations.

 
Unisys & Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center (.wmv, 4:31)

Unified Law Enforcement through a Real-Time Infrastructure

The center’s more powerful and resilient IT infrastructure has improved real-time communications among multiple levels of criminal justice agencies – enabling greater collaboration, and ultimately, a better response to criminal activities and other security concerns.

 

Metrics

Business Challenge: Improve Data Delivery to Enhance Citizen Safety 

The Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center (ACJIC) is a state agency providing local, state, and federal criminal justice agencies with the information needed to ensure citizen safety.

 

In 2004, ACJIC realized that gaps in its information technology were hindering communications and business continuity. It needed to more efficiently deliver critical information from its network and systems.

 

Maury Mitchell, Director of ACJIC explains, “We’re connected to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, and we’re in sync with all 50 states via the National Law Enforcement Telecommunication System. As such, our web applications handle about 18 million transactions a month. We were leasing space and time on the state’s mainframe for data storage – a system we don’t own – performing backups on tape and manually delivering them to a site a few blocks away for disaster recovery. We needed our own scalable, reliable, cost-effective system that would grow with our needs and provide hot failover.”

 

ACJIC decided to change the way it was doing business. Jim Walker, Homeland Security Director for the State of Alabama, comments, “We had an opportunity to build redundancy into our system and improve the availability and use of information. We needed a solution that would build trust and deliver value to our user population.”

 

ACJIC explored several solutions and solution providers before choosing Unisys to help establish an IT infrastructure specifically designed to address the agency’s requirements.

 

Solution: Re-Engineering for Real-Time, Cost-Effective Business Continuance

Unisys provided a real-time infrastructure with improved disaster recovery and business continuity through a turnkey solution comprising an ES7000/one enterprise server platform, Unisys SafeGuard 30m, and EMC SAN technology.

 

The ES7000/one server gives us reliability, performance, and flexibility to grow.
Jeff Matthews
Information Technology Director
ACJIC

Jeff Matthews, Information Technology Director at ACJIC, explains, “The ES7000/one server gives us reliability, performance, and flexibility to grow. We’re using Microsoft® SQL Server 2005® combined with a Windows® Server 2003 system to ensure replication and gain the power of clustering.” Combined with the SafeGuard 30m solution, this supports failover requirements.

 

“We can now provide system patches and updates with extreme ease. SafeGuard 30m helps us guarantee hot failover and disaster recovery capabilities for our mission-critical systems through real-time data replication,” comments Matthews.

 

SafeGuard 30m helps us guarantee hot failover and disaster recovery capabilities for our mission-critical systems through real-time data replication.
Jeff Matthews
Information Technology Director

Several of ACJIC’s top-tier web applications serving the law enforcement community are tapping into the SafeGuard 30m solution, including AlaCOP – the Alabama Communications and Operations Portal. AlaCOP is a unique, role-based portal for every ACJIC user in the system, developed using Microsoft SharePoint® Server 2007 software. The new ES7000/one and SafeGuard 30m environment helps ensure that vital information accessed via AlaCOP is available 24x7 for improved collaboration and responsiveness.

 

High-availability and failover benefits extend to e-mail operations. “We’ve made significant progress migrating our Microsoft Exchange 2007 users to the ES7000/one – with about 80 percent of our users on the new system and more being added daily,” says Mitchell.

 

Results: Improved Efficiency While Lowering Downtime, Risk, and Costs

With its Unisys solution, ACJIC is seeing immediate results, including:

With the ES7000/one and SafeGuard 30m solution, ACJIC has greatly reduced risk. “In the past, a failure in the primary application supporting law enforcement caused nearly two hours of downtime,” says Matthews. “Our new disaster recovery system allows failover in less than one minute from our primary site to our disaster recovery site, which is extremely critical as we support law enforcement across the state and nation. Plus, our 15,000 e-mail users always have access to messages.” Maury Mitchell says these improvements have addressed key goals: “The constant flow of real-time information has helped to ensure citizen and officer safety.”

 

Every time data was accessed from the mainframe, there was a transactional cost. Now, all data is stored to our SAN solution. We’ve exponentially increased transactions and improved data availability while costs have gone down tremendously.
Maury Mitchell
Director
ACJIC

ACJIC also has lowered costs. Mitchell explains, “Every time data was accessed from the mainframe, there was a transactional cost. Now, all data is stored to our SAN solution. We’ve exponentially increased transactions and improved data availability while costs have gone down tremendously. Unisys has delivered good value for our money.”

 

ACJIC’s is enjoying streamlined communications, as well. “Before we introduced AlaCOP, our users were accessing multiple systems through a variety of methods. Now, everyone is driven to a common interface and it has easily handled a dramatically increased workload. The response times on our Law Enforcement Tactical System are amazing. Within one or two seconds, users can search up to 40 million records,” says Mitchell.

 

And, thanks to its web-based technologies and powerful platform, ACJIC is leading the transition to better communications in Alabama. “We’ve already seen better collaboration among agencies – we’re sharing more data today than ever before. Plus, our internal departments are becoming more unified,” confirms Mitchell.

 

Beyond enhanced data integrity and access, ACJIC is now positioned to provide true real-time disaster recovery capabilities to any Alabama public safety agency needing support with its reliable and scalable Unisys solution.

 

If you talk to the average officer across the state, they will undoubtedly say that we’re in a much better position today than three years ago because of our technical capabilities.
Maury Mitchell
Director
ACJIC

The Relationship: A Strategic Partnership

“The Unisys team provided us with the strategic direction and expertise that we didn’t have in-house.  As we went through the process of deploying this system, Unisys help and Microsoft support were key,” says Matthews. Mitchell adds, “If you talk to the average officer across the state, they will undoubtedly say that we’re in a much better position today than three years ago because of our technical capabilities.”

 

Profile: Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center

Solution at a Glance

 

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