Is the cloud safe enough to lock up law enforcement data?

Grazed from GSN.  Author: Rutrell Yasin.

The use of cloud computing in some form is inevitable in police technology. But like many professions, law enforcement executives have particular concerns about using cloud technology, ranging from the risk that unauthorized persons could steal sensitive information to concerns about the costs of technology migration.

A report, “Mitigating Risks in the Application of Cloud Computing in Law Enforcement," aims to help law enforcement officials weigh the pros and cons of moving to cloud computing. Written by Paul Wormeli, executive director emeritus of the Integrated Justice Information Systems Institute, and presented by the IBM Center for The Business of Government, the report offers recommendations on how law enforcement organizations can successfully move to cloud infrastructures…

Wormeli found that the major worries of the law enforcement community about moving to the cloud included cloud reliability and availability, performance requirements, costs of migration, and the recovery of data.  In a survey, most law enforcement officials said they were especially concerned about whether cloud computing was appropriate for mission-critical applications such as computer-aided dispatch, records management, criminal justice information and intelligence systems. And of all these areas, unauthorized access to sensitive information is the community’s biggest concern, according to the survey…

Read more from the source @ http://gcn.com/articles/2013/01/25/cloud-safe-law-enforcement-data.aspx