AWS Signs CJIS Agreement with the State of Washington

AWS signed a Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) agreement with the State of Washington. Washington joins other states, including California, Minnesota, Colorado, Oregon, and Louisiana, that work with AWS to leverage the benefits of the cloud, while satisfying the most demanding information security requirements.

More than 30,000 of Amazon’s employees work in Washington and value the work that Washington’s law enforcement agencies do to protect citizens in the state.

AWS is proud to provide law enforcement agencies with the resources they need to address their unique IT needs, allowing state and local police to leverage the AWS Cloud for CJI data, including biometric, identity history, person, organization, property, and case/incident history data. When police departments are confident that their data is secure, they can focus on their mission to increase safety, transparency, and trust.

“As law enforcement agencies in the State of Washington implement new technologies, such as body cameras, this agreement allows them to take advantage of a secure cloud infrastructure to handle the deluge of data,” said Michael Wagers, AWS Global Justice and Public Safety Lead. “The AWS Cloud also enables better tools for analytics and information sharing, helping police departments keep communities and their officers safe.”

When a state signs a CJIS agreement, it enables local law enforcement agencies to run CJIS workloads in the cloud with the assurance that they are compliant with CJIS standards.

For example, King County, the most populous county in Washington, needed a more efficient and cost-effective solution to replace a tape-based backup system used to store information generated by 17 different county agencies. The county turned to AWS for long-term archiving and storage using Amazon Glacier and NetApp’s AltaVault solution, which helps the county meet federal security standards, including HIPAA and CJIS regulations. The county has saved about $1 million in the first year by not replacing outdated servers, and projects an ongoing annual savings of about $200,000 by reducing operational costs related to data storage.

To learn more about how AWS and our partner community are supporting Justice and Public Safety customers, please visit – https://aws.amazon.com/stateandlocal/justice-and-public-safety/