AWS Public Sector Blog

How Livingston Parish prepares for natural disasters by improving resiliency in the cloud

This is a guest post by Tommy Alderman, partner at TailorBuilt Solutions, LLC.

Natural disasters are devastating, often resulting in loss of life and massive property damage. According to the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), as of October 11, 2022, the US has sustained 15 weather/climate disaster events, with losses exceeding $1 billion each, the deaths of 342 people, and significant economic effects on the areas impacted. Natural disasters can also damage the critical infrastructure that powers emergency services—prompting public sector organizations to consider building more resilient infrastructure.

Such was the case for the 911 system in Livingston Parish, Louisiana, an agency that dispatches for 21 public safety agencies including law enforcement, fire, and emergency medical services, and averages over 325 calls for service per day. After a major flood in 2016 knocked out their 911 system, they decided to use the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud to become resilient against disaster, reducing service interruptions and improving response times.

When a natural disaster strikes

“In 2016, we lost the ability for information-sharing other than our radio system and our voice transmission capability,” said Jack Varnado, 911 director at Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office in Livingston Parish, Louisiana. “Our IT director had to physically wade into our 911 center, pull the entire computer-aided dispatch (CAD) server out, carrying it through rising water to put it in his vehicle to get it higher ground. Then it took him several days to set it back up and get it running again. It was good that he could do that, of course, but we realized then that we needed to do something different because during that flood, we had just nothing but paper logs.”

Varnado and his team realized that moving to the cloud could enhance storage, availability, and security – reducing paper logs, improving agency communication, and making sure dispatch operations can relocate to anywhere with an internet connection and be up and running in minutes.

“There are a couple of things about moving to the cloud that have been intriguing for us, including the ability to have your information anywhere, where it can be accessed and stored anywhere and backed up in multiple locations,” said Varnado. “Command Staff, Uniform Patrol, or Detectives can get involved from a standpoint of knowing exactly what is happening on an event without having to bother that detective or that uniform patrol deputy or the supervisor on the road.”

Livingston had to choose a cloud provider that could meet their needs as a critical public safety service agency and their community’s expectations for emergency response. “We’ve done a ton of research on the cloud, and in looking at the robustness of AWS, the way that they use multiple data centers, multiple connections into those data centers, how those data centers are backed up, and the compute power, the security… All of that is so important as we’re putting public safety platforms into the cloud, especially our CAD system with such sensitive and confidential data. Not just for our agency, but for the people that we serve.”

Leveraging the AWS Partner Network for customized solutions

Ultimately, Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office chose TailorBuilt Solutions, LLC (TBS), an AWS Partner that specializes in custom software programming for public safety agencies, to create a brand-new CAD system that would be fully developed as a cloud-native application. In Varnado’s estimation, custom development was key.

“The ability to customize to our needs as a Sheriff’s office, or a 911 Center, is so important because the way we do it here at Livingston is totally different than the way that New York City may do it, or even Little Rock, Arkansas may do it because of population size, because of the needs and the types of services that we provide,” said Varnado.

Joel House, founding partner at TBS, said “Having determined that the TBS application would run on the Linux operating system, we explored several Linux distributions before settling upon Amazon Linux 2 as the ideal platform for our web-based applications. Amazon Linux 2 is a secure, stable, no-cost, high-performance Linux operating system optimized by Amazon to run on [Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)] compute instances. Eliminating the cost of operating system server licensing and support helps reduce the overall system cost to the customer, in this case, Livingston 911, who was more than happy to realize those savings.”

The remaining architecture upon which the TBS CAD is built consists of several AWS services that, according to House, provide a specially designed platform for mission-critical cloud-native applications. For example, AWS auto-scaling and application load-balancing allow public safety customers to focus attention on providing services to their citizens rather than worrying about provisioning the right number of servers and the right amount of compute power. Amazon Aurora and Amazon Aurora Serverless relational databases support the 911 environment with timely access to, and the security of, their critical data. Amazon ElastiCache offers even more speed to data transfers to and from the 911 center by caching frequently accessed data points like available dispatch resources, ongoing call locations, and mapping and geographic information system (GIS) resources. The TBS CAD uses Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to provide a complete notification package to customers, covering both automated texts or emails with closed CAD event information and system notifications. The solution also uses Amazon Route53, which supports domain name system (DNS) system availability, and AWS Security Hub, a cloud security posture management service, which performs security best practice checks, aggregates alerts, and enables automated remediation in an environment that supports stringent Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) criminal justice information services (CJIS) requirements.

Results that improve resiliency and help with continuity of emergency services

Varnado said that since deploying their new cloud-native TBS CAD in May 2022, Livingston Parish experienced no service interruptions, and seamless mobile access from patrol vehicles, fire trucks, and other mobile units. And he has been pleased with the speed and responsiveness of the system. But mostly, the key benefit for Varnado is peace of mind.

“The ability to access our CAD no matter where we find ourselves has been a game-changer for us. Recently, I was at a meeting almost a hundred miles away from my office, and I was able to securely log right into my CAD as if I were sitting at a dispatch console in my communications center. We certainly hope we never again experience a disaster like we did in 2016, but we live in an area prone to threats from hurricanes and other natural disasters. So even if the worst comes to pass, we have peace of mind knowing that as long as we can find a location with access to the internet, we can instantly be up and running, securely answering calls for service and getting help to those in need.”

Learn more about how AWS helps justice and public safety agencies modernize and innovate for their constituents at the Justice & Public Safety main page. Do you have any questions about how to use AWS or AWS Partners to support your teams and constituents? Connect with us.

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