Cisco Helps Cops Capture Crooks With Video Cloud

Cisco technology is being used in an innovative system that allows police and other law enforcement agencies to upload video from cameras worn by officers directly to a cloud service.

Cisco announced this week that its Unified Computing System technology is being used by Taser International, maker of stun weapons and electronic evidence collection tools, for a project know as Evidence.com, in which video and other electronic information is collected by officers to be uploaded to a hosted database.

“Evidence.Com enables agencies to store video data according to their own retention policies, access it on demand with industry leading security, and use powerful mapping and analytics software to synthesise it with location and other relevant information,” Taser International states.

According to Cisco, Evidence.com could eventually generate millions of video streams a year. This would require a platform with the capacity to initially manage 10 petabytes of video and data, increasing to 200 petabytes within three years.

The Cisco Unified Computing System underpinning the sytem is configured with two chassis and 16 server blades, connected to redundant Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches over 10Gb Ethernet. The system accesses an IBM storage area network (SAN) using a Cisco MDS 9124 Multilayer Switch and uses VMware ESX for the virtualised environment. Cisco Catalyst 4900 Series Switches provide access to the Gigabit Ethernet servers.

“When a law enforcement agency subscribes to the Evidence.com service, a small video camera worn by the officer captures video of officer encounters,” Taser International states. “At the end of their shift, officers dock the unit to upload the encrypted video over a highly secure link. Video and data are stored according to each agency’s retention policies, and authorised users need only a broadband connection to retrieve their video on demand.”

To make sure that information uploaded to Evidence.com can’t be tampered with, the companies claim to have developed an “extensive defense-in-depth strategy” with eight levels of protection, using solutions including Cisco firewalls, the Cisco Intrusion Prevention System, and Cisco physical security solutions to monitor the facility.

Recent research from structured data specialist RainStor revealed that only 22 percent of UK companies are already using a software as a service (SaaS) application, compared with 49 percent in the United States. A further 28 percent of UK companies intend to make use of SaaS in the foreseeable future, compared with 42 percent of US companies.