The Wisconsin cities of Fitchburg, Middleton, and Sun Prairie made a strategic decision to collaborate on a joint effort to provide common records management, dispatch, and locationing services for and between their individual municipal police and fire departments. A joint task force with members of each of these cities was formed and named the Multi-Jurisdictional Public Safety Information System (MPSIS) team. The MPSIS team designed much needed upgrades to their shared network infrastructure to facilitate their objectives.
The records management is the biggest part of the network. However, the dispatch systems, locationing services and database access are critical components of the network, requiring connections between the three cities to remain available at all times. Fitchburg serves as the centralized network hub, the area data center and the location of the network administrator.
The network had been in place for a number of years using relatively slow T1 links to connect Middleton and Sun Prairie police departments to the Fitchburg network hub. MPSIS recently approved a project to upgrade these network connections to high-speed wireless.
The RFP issued by MPSIS required that the connections to Middleton and Sun Prairie operate over native Layer 2 links to preserve the existing IP network addressing scheme, maintain the performance of high availability applications running on the network, and to avoid disruptive architecture changes to the network infrastructure. MPSIS had already determined that in the event of a server outage, failover to a back up server would take several minutes in a routed network, as opposed to seconds in a switched network. This gap in availability could present a public safety issue and was not acceptable. All three police departments must have uninterrupted access to data and the dispatchers must maintain location awareness of the squad cars in the field.
With all three police departments requiring access to both state and federal databases, the upgrade needed to comply with the Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) security requirements. As part of that compliance, the existing traffic from the network hub to the Fitchburg Fire Department would have to remain in clear text and separate from the Police Departments traffic. This requirement for data segmentation was a particular concern for MPSIS as the inability to preserve this existing link would increase the overall cost of the project.
MPSIS released the RFP for the network upgrade and received five acceptable bids. Two of the bids proposed wireless radios with built-in encryption. The three remaining bids proposed other wireless connections, but did not address the CJIS security requirements.
After weighing the alternatives it was decided to go with a wireless only solution due to concerns regarding the overall cost, bulkiness and slow performance of the integrated radio solutions. The wireless only solution, however, did not address securing the information over this connection. MPSIS determined encryption was the most efficient and effective method of securing the wireless connections between the towns to meet the CJIS security requirements. Accordingly, the remaining vendors were told that a third party solution for the encryption had to be found prior to awarding the bid. One of the wireless equipment vendors recommended that MPSIS look at CipherOptics.
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