PUBLIC SAFETY

Management Summary

Public SafetyThe problem was simple—Nlets, a national public safety service provider, needed to upgrade its communication technology to facilitate a Disaster Recovery plan; yet State Agencies, the users of the service, had bigger and more pressing issues at the time.  The solution was for Nlets to provide the State Agencies with a conversion utility that converted from the State Agency communication technology to the Nlets-supported communication technology.    This project was to develop such a utility.

Backstory

  • The International Justice and Public Safety Network (Nlets) links together and supports every state, local, and federal law enforcement, justice and public safety agency for the purposes of sharing and exchanging critical information.
  • The Nlets organization has existed for over 50 years.  As technology has changed, newer, faster communication interfaces have been added to Nlets.  The state agencies have not been as quick to adopt these new communication interfaces.
  • To support current day disaster recovery plans that entail seamless fail over from the primary site to the backup site, older communication interfaces have been deprecated.
  • To ensure that Nlets Disaster Recovery Plans are not hindered by States utilizing deprecated communication technologies, Nlets would need to provide the States access to technology that would convert the deprecated communication interface to the newer communication technology.
  • This conversion technology was envisioned to run at the State sites.

Business Objective

  • Facilitate the new Nlets Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity initiative by providing the States with communication conversion technologies that convert legacy Nlets communication protocols to modern day communication protocols

Functional Requirements

  • Convert the deprecated Nlets sockets protocol to the Nlets Web Services protocol
  • Provide seamless plug-in of conversion technology into the State network
  • Be able to run conversion technology both in a physical server and in a virtual machine (VM) environment
  • Allow States to determine the level of redundancy of the conversion technology
  • Monitor the conversion technology’s operation via the Nlets Operation Center

Technical Requirements

  • Conversion technology runs in a Windows® 2012 R2 environment
  • Any required hardware is off-the-shelf

Outcome

A Plexus Message Broker was enhanced to communicate to Nlets via the Nlets Web Services communication protocol and to the State Switch via the Nlets sockets communication protocol.  States can employ various levels of redundancy via either physical servers or virtual environments.