Cloud Benefits for Public Safety

The nature of public safety applications is such that the advantages of shared systems are greater in both cost and utility. Public safety applications are increasingly interconnected to inter-agency, regional, state, and national systems and databases. Each premise-based system must be individually connected to each external system. Every point to- point connection takes network engineering, interfacing, monitoring, maintenance, support, and may require time-consuming certi cations and audits. Shared systems come with shared external connections, live and pre-certifi ed.

As new data sources and applications become available, the cloud model makes it possible to amortize the investment required (to make third-party plug-in services available to users) over the entire user population. With lower integration costs come greater incentives for the creation of new, innovative technologies. As the cost-benefi t of supporting third party services is enhanced by lower up-front costs, support for the add-on marketplace becomes a competitive advantage. Here is a complete report