Digital Transformation and Public Safety Technology

Public safety is facing monumental change. The pandemic, budget cutbacks, and rising crime rates across the country have left many government agencies wondering, “Where do we go from here?”

Driven by calls to “reimagine public safety,” many public safety agencies are looking to new technologies for a solution. To meet these challenges, agencies are embracing digital transformation. This shift gives public safety employees the ability to make better-informed decisions, enables secure remote access for those working from home, and creates opportunities for cross-agency collaboration.

Digital transformation as a solution

Digital transformation applies new and emerging digital technologies to innovate services and businesses across a variety of sectors. While more commonly associated with how it supports customers and consumer products, digital transformation also provides substantial opportunities to improve current public safety measures. Digital technologies like smart video and audio surveillance, smart street lights, body-worn cameras (BWC) and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices can help protect citizens and support public safety efforts. But, with these opportunities often come challenges. Innovations push the boundaries of existing approaches. The public cloud, mobile devices with access to critical information and enhanced digital security are digital transformation applications with potentially enormous impacts.

Identify Network challenges

As the shift toward digitization continues, public safety agents must carefully monitor their virtual space. IT decision-makers confront a wide range of network challenges to ensure IoT solutions are reliable enough to be depended on by public safety officers.

Bandwidth is generally the first challenge that comes up in conversation. IoT devices collect and generate huge volumes of data; artificial intelligence and machine learning can analyze that data to unearth insights that support strategic public safety decisions.

Another obstacle that is no less daunting concerns data storage. Public safety agencies can be required to store critical video footage and other data for five years or longer.¹ The amount of storage needed for BWCs alone can be immense, costly and time-consuming to manage on-premises. As a result, 88 percent of police forces are considering investing in cloud services to expand their storage and computing capabilities.²

What’s the current state of your network? Managing thousands of IoT-generated video files that need to be accessible on-demand means network operations is of the utmost importance. This may include multiple internet connections, private networks that move encrypted data among police stations and courthouses and increasingly sophisticated solutions for routing and traffic management. Complexity is a persistent challenge for public safety organizations that lack the in-house IT resources to keep pace with expanding demands on their networks.

The number of cyberattacks is growing exponentially every year, with the increase in mobile applications, social media platforms, and other technologies serving as the catalyst. This trend can be seen across all sectors, but it is one of particular concern in public safety, so the importance of having a secure network can’t be overstated. On average, it takes 324 days to detect and contain a data breach caused by a malicious attack on the public sector.³ At the same time, 56 percent of state IT leaders are not very confident in the cybersecurity practices at their state and local government organizations.⁴ On top of the daily management of the network, public safety IT teams must develop plans to protect sensitive data from IoT devices and other applications.

Choose the right networking solution to achieve your goals

Prediction and preparation are always the best practices when seeking to improve mounting public safety issues by means of digital transformation. But addressing public safety challenges is not always as simple as rolling out a new digital tool. A managed services partner can help the entire integration team by deploying elegant solutions to any given public safety problem, like the following:

High-capacity connectivity
Enterprise fiber solutions can handle even the most demanding public safety data traffic. Carrier-grade internet and Ethernet offer reliable connections between stored IoT data and investigators or courts. The best providers deliver security, reliability and throughput up to 100 Gbps with service-level agreements that meet the high standards of public safety organizations.

Connections to the cloud
By migrating to the cloud, organizations can save an average of 15% of their IT costs.⁵ Connecting a network to the cloud offers scalability to meet evolving data storage needs. What’s more, this can also eliminate the upfront capital costs and ongoing maintenance associated with managing an on-premises data center.

Network technologies
A software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) offers the ability to manage a complex multi-site network more easily from the cloud. It uses intelligent traffic routing to allocate bandwidth in real-time to support changing network demands or to keep essential systems online in the event of a disruption. This helps networks scale to accommodate vast amounts of data, ensuring the ability to access video footage when and where it’s needed.

Provider-managed security
A unified threat management solution with an advanced firewall can help protect the perimeter of a network. Meanwhile, distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection from a connectivity partner can identify and neutralize volumetric attacks. Managed security services from a nationwide network provider can assist in maintaining and managing cybersecurity solutions for public-sector agencies with limited resources.

Managed solutions
In addition to security, public safety agencies can rely on managed services for other elements of their networks, such as routing, WiFi and SD-WAN. The right solutions provider can help free agencies from routine IT tasks like firmware updates, security patches and other network maintenance — allowing them to focus more on how best to protect and serve their communities. Working with a single partner providing multiple solutions can also simplify network management, strengthen security and give agencies one number to call to resolve an issue.

As public safety is reimagined, it’s important that we don’t encourage digital transformation and adoption simply for the sake of innovation, but because it allows agencies to meet and serve citizens where they are in this increasingly digital world. Modernizing a network to support data-intensive applications can be a challenge for organizations navigating the daily demands of first responders. A trusted provider of network services with experience serving state and local governments can help them enhance network components like SD-WAN, WiFi, routing and firewalls.

Your network is critical to your success and the safety of your citizens. Discover how you can deploy public safety solutions with Spectrum Enterprise.

¹ James Careless, “How Body-worn Cameras Can Improve Police Transparency While Promoting Officer Safety,” Police1, Jan. 19, 2021.
² Maham Zaidi, “Cloud Adoption is Essential for Law Enforcement,” Vidizmo, accessed Nov. 30, 2021.
³ “Cost of a Data Breach Report,” IBM, 2020.
⁴ “States at Risk: The Cybersecurity Imperative in Uncertain Times,” Deloitte and the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, 2020.
⁵ Kyle Turco, “4 Ways Cloud Computing Can Save Your Company Money,” Technology Advice, June 24, 2021.