CLETS and Microsoft

CLETS provides law enforcement and criminal justice agencies access to FBI and state Criminal Justice Information, along with the ability to communicate messages to other agencies. As the interface to criminal justice information systems, CLETS approval is required for access to critical, life-saving public safety information. In November 2016, CLETS approved the Chula Vista Police Department to utilize Azure and Microsoft Office 365 government cloud services for Criminal Justice Information.

CLETS and Microsoft

California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System approves Microsoft Government Cloud services for Criminal Justice Information

This approval allows law enforcement agencies throughout California the opportunity to meet the regulatory controls of the CJIS Security Policy while taking advantage of hyper-scale cloud computing.

Eric Wood, Chula Vista Police Technology Manager, said: “We are excited at Chula Vista Police Department to have received approval from the CLETS Advisory Committee to utilize Microsoft Office 365 and Azure services in the Government Cloud to fulfill our agency’s critical public safety mission. We deeply appreciate Microsoft’s partnership, trust and transparency which have made it possible to meet the security requirements of the CJIS Security Policy for these new technologies. We can now provide our personnel current tools that deliver capabilities, security and reliability which would otherwise be beyond our reach for on-premises solutions with limited staffing”.

As shown with Microsoft’s collaboration with Chula Vista Police Department, the company sees meeting the applicable regulatory controls of the CJIS Security Policy as a long-term commitment. As Microsoft Corp. specifies in its statement “we don’t consider it a checkbox, it is a commitment”.

CLETS is an acronym standing for California Law Enforcement Telecommunication System, a high-speed message switching system which became operational in 1970. CLETS provides law enforcement and criminal justice agencies access to many databases. It also provides ability to transmit and receive point-to-point administrative messages to other agencies within California or via the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (NLETS) to other states. Broadcast messages can be transmitted intrastate to participating agencies in the Group Bulletin Network and to regions nationwide via NLETS.

CLETS has direct interface with the FBI-NCIC, NLETS, DMV, Oregon and Nevada. The state provides the computer hardware, switching center personnel, administrative personnel, and the circuitry to one point in each county. The local agencies provide the circuitry and equipment which link them to their county termination point. A number of agencies have message switching computer (MSC) systems and computer aided dispatch (CAD) systems which directly connect to CLETS. Many of these systems have mobile data terminals (MDTs) which allow an officer in the field to inquire directly into various systems.

As to Microsoft Azure, its initial release took place on February 1, 2010 and this is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure created by Microsoft for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers. Microsoft Azure provides SaaS, PaaS and IaaS services. The system supports many different programming languages, tools and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems.

Microsoft Azure can be used with virtual machines, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) allowing users to launch general-purpose Microsoft Windows and Linux virtual machines, as well as preconfigured machine images for popular software packages; App services, platform as a service (PaaS) environment letting developers easily publish and manage Web sites; Websites, high density hosting of websites allows developers to build sites using ASP.NET, PHP, Node.js, or Python and can be deployed using FTP, Git, Mercurial, Team Foundation Server or uploaded through the user portal.

Customers can create websites in PHP, ASP.NET, Node.js, or Python, or select from several open source applications from a gallery to deploy. Among other features, Storage Services provides REST and SDK APIs for storing and accessing data on the cloud. Table Service lets programs store structured text in partitioned collections of entities that are accessed by partition key and primary key. It’s a NoSQL non-relational database.

Blob Service allows programs to store unstructured text and binary data as blobs that can be accessed by a HTTP(S) path. Blob service also provides security mechanisms to control access to data.

Queue Service lets programs communicate asynchronously by message using queues. File Service allows storing and access of data on the cloud using the REST APIs or the SMB protocol. Azure Search provides text search and a subset of OData’s structured filters using REST or SDK APIs. DocumentDB is a NoSQL database service that implements a subset of the SQL SELECT statement on JSON documents.

Redis Cache is a managed implementation of Redis. StorSimple manages storage tasks between on-premises devices and cloud storage. SQL Database, formerly known as SQL Azure Database, works to create, scale and extend applications into the cloud using Microsoft SQL Server technology. It also integrates with Active Directory and Microsoft System Center and Hadoop. SQL Data Warehouse is a data warehousing service designed to handle computational and data intensive queries on datasets exceeding 1TB.

The Microsoft Azure Service Bus allows applications running on Azure premises or off premises devices to communicate with Azure. This helps to build scalable and reliable applications in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The Azure service bus supports four different types of communication mechanisms.

(Information about Microsoft Azure taken from Wikipedia).

CLETS Logo. Image in public domain

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