The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) announced results of an IACP / SafeGov / Ponemon Institute survey of IACP member agencies. The survey examined how local and state law enforcement officials view the potential of cloud computing in the law enforcement environment and their plans for the future. A total of 272 agencies responded to the survey, and nearly three-quarters (71 percent) of the respondents were the chief executives of their agencies.

In celebration of Data Privacy Day, SafeGov is releasing this "Cloud Computing for Education" video for educational institution leaders. This video provides guidance on selecting cloud service providers with an emphasis on data protection and security recommendations.

There are many reasons why law enforcement has been slow to embrace the cloud—from general reluctance to deploy new technologies to procurement policies that make purchasing cloud services more difficult.

Ironically, cloud adoption by public safety has lagged many industries for which the benefi­ts are not nearly as great. The nature of public safety applications is such that the advantages of shared systems are greater in both cost and utility.

In the SaaS model, a vendor takes responsibility for not only infrastructure, but also for all of the processes required to manage an entire application solution (patches, upgrades, backups, database management, systems tuning, performance management, etc.). Because SaaS vendors manage many customers on a small number of application instances, they can amortize infrastructure costs over many customers. In other words, the inherent savings of the cloud are compounded when many agencies share a single system.

The U.S. Federal Government has adopted a “cloud first” policy that requires agencies default to cloud-based solutions whenever a secure, reliable, cloud option exists. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued a three volume Cloud Computing Technology Roadmap and initiated a standards acceleration program so that best practices from the private sector can be used for government systems immediately, without a protracted standards process.

In October 2012 approximately 3.6 million Social Security numbers and 387,000 credit and debit card numbers belonging to South Carolina taxpayers were potentially exposed to exploitation by cyber attacks that penetrated the servers operated by the South Carolina Department of Revenue.

Nestled in the fields of Normandy near the banks of the Seine, an ultra-modern data center has just switched on thousands of servers. The center belongs to a new French cloud infrastructure provider called CloudWatt. Its stated purpose? Defeating the USA Patriot Act by placing French cloud data beyond the long arm of American authorities. For, laments Le Monde in an article announcing CloudWatt’s launch, “the supercomputers of the biggest cloud providers, such as Amazon or Google, are all located outside of France”. In particular, they are mostly located in the United States, where – according to Le Monde – the Patriot Act “allows the American government to access any data it pleases if the data is considered sensitive”.

When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969, he famously declared it as “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” But Armstrong’s moon walk was more than just a milestone in human history: it represented an accomplishment achieved through American teamwork and cooperation.

While most people are already familiar with the term cloud computing, our goal with this short video is to introduce some generally accepted definitions and reference points in order to provide a common framework for dialog about cloud computing.