PNP Digitizes Licensing Workflow for Government and Private Personnel, Cuts Processing Times by 96% Using AWS

The PNP, with a force of about 232,000 officers, encountered significant challenges in its largely manual, paper-based licensing process for its stakeholders. Before 2024, applicants had to visit the licensing offices multiple times, leading to delays and costs for both applicants and staff.

Applicants often queued as early as 4 am on a first-come, first-serve basis and needed multiple visits to submit documents and take photos. Staff also spent hours verifying and approving applications for different license types, each with different requirements. This manual process constrained each office's capacity, resulting in extended wait times and additional costs for applicants who had to take unpaid leave and cover their travel expenses. On average, each applicant's licensing process can take up to four weeks.

PNP's on-premises infrastructure presented challenges in terms of cost, scalability, and occasional service disruptions, which impacted processing times. To address these issues and enhance the licensing process, PNP sought a more streamlined, accessible, scalable, and secure solution that would benefit both aspiring security guards and the organization.

To enhance efficiency and streamline the licensing process, PNP migrated its workload from an on-premises infrastructure to AWS. This transition facilitated the development and deployment of a web-based licensing application entirely in the cloud. By digitizing the workflow, PNP can now pre-approve applications submitted online, reducing the average processing time of up to four weeks to just 24 hours.

PNP uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for its secure and resizable compute capacity, which supports virtually any workload. As a result, the organization can now automatically scale resources to meet transactional demands, processing up to 17,000 applications daily while maintaining near-100 percent uptime.

PNP also deploys Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), a fully managed object storage service, to securely store up to one terabyte of licensing data, including applicants' photos and clearances. This shift also frees PNP engineers to spend more time developing new services and features instead of maintaining infrastructure.

To ensure fast and reliable access to the licensing application, PNP utilizes Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network service that delivers the app at high transfer speeds and low latency. The organization also uses AWS WAF, a web application firewall, to protect the licensing application from common web exploits and bots, thus providing a secure and scalable infrastructure.

While PNP continues to maintain high availability for its licensing application, the organization is also focusing on future improvements. PNP plans to consolidate its operations under a single AWS account, streamlining management across all offices. Additionally, the organization is developing a comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery plan through AWS, ensuring long-term reliability and security.

“Using AWS, we have revolutionized our licensing process by creating a fully digital workflow in the cloud. What once took up to a month now takes less than a week, greatly improving efficiency and cost-effectiveness. This transformation enables us to rapidly deploy personnel, better serving our community and enhancing our capability to maintain peace and order across the country,” said Police Captain Mohamed T Panaga, Information Technology Project Officer for the PNP.