Alaska Correction Officers Have On-Demand Database Access

Nov 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By ASHLEY ROE

In security speak, it's known as the first mile of information.

Synonymous with the concept of “the right information at the right time,” that first mile of information, says Tushar Mutreja, senior manager for state and local government, at Citrix Systems Inc., Fort Lauderdale, Fla., is often the most critical for a correctional officer's success while working in the field. For example, an officer may instantly need a detailed description of an escaped offender while on a chase, or he or she might be curious if a driver who has been pulled over has a criminal history. Mutreja contends that “not having the right information at the right time could lead to serious consequences,” especially in law enforcement.

At the Alaska Department of Corrections, numerous “first miles” of information must travel to officers across a vast and rural area equal to two-thirds of the U.S. mainland. The department's IT specialists quickly found that this type of environment does not bode well for connectivity. With 13 correctional institutions, 16 probation offices and 1,250 users dispersed over 570,374 square miles; the department needed a way to provide bulk access to its Offender Tracking Information System (OTIS) whether in the field or the office. The offender tracking system is the department's key application for managing inmate information such as physical descriptors, charges and booking and release dates. Every piece of information, from the time a prisoner is charged and processed to the time he or she is released, is stored in OTIS. Remote access to the database is critical for the success of the department's correctional officers.

“Lots of our institution locations are spread out, so connectivity becomes cumbersome,” says Daniel Roberts, Alaska Department of Corrections microcomputer network specialist. “There are virtually five or six states between some of these institutions, and in a lot of these rural areas, connectivity is comparable to that in a third world country, so this was a major challenge.”

At the Anvil Mountain Correctional Center in Nome, Alaska, a facility housing offenders with short-term sentences, users initially worked off a satellite connection of less than 128K. “When these employees used OTIS, it took up to one minute and 30 seconds to refresh a screen or simply to bring up information,” Roberts says. “That was the worst case scenario for us. We had to increase its performance.” In early 2005, the department began working with Citrix Systems Inc to improve connectivity.

Roberts and the IT staff completed a proof of concept using components of the Citrix Access Platform, a suite of integrated security applications designed to give users secure, on-demand access to information from anywhere in the field. “What we did was set up a small installation platform in two of our central offices and tested it for two months,” Roberts says. That initial test, which took place in the Juneau and Anchorage correctional offices, was a success. In early 2006, the department began implementing the system at its central data center with the help of security system vendor Right! Systems Inc., Lacey, Wash.

The IT team installed the Citrix Presentation Server to maintain and deploy OTIS. As the access platform's flagship product, the Citrix Presentation Server allows client-server applications to be deployed and managed in the data center, while granting secure access, using a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), to employees on mobile devices anywhere. As an immediate result, information sharing among statewide department employees improved. The previous OTIS application, a bandwidth-intensive COBOL system that was connected over a Wide Area Network, was unable to accommodate large uploads of data. Thus, employees began entering only a minimal set of details as they entered and updated inmate records. The Citrix system uses available bandwidth by transmitting mouse clicks and keystrokes over the network, instead of entire documents. The new configuration gave employees faster upload times even over slow dial-up connections and across far distances. The faster upload times empowered department employees to enter complete inmate information, which resulted in a more accurate transfer of information from one employee to another.

The Citrix Presentation Server also improved the security and privacy of the data stored in OTIS, a necessary measure when working with widespread remote connections. The department previously relied on network firewalls for security; however, the firewalls did not guarantee security outside of the offices. Now OTIS resides on secure, consolidated servers that allow IT managers to control access based on each employee's responsibility and needs. Employees use a single sign-on password to access all applications on the server, and screen images and keystrokes are encrypted to prevent theft or hacking.

“Our update times are now close to immediate,” Roberts says. “We do not have to maintain 750 desktops individually. Now, we can access them and install updates directly from our data center.” The updates are also applied to the dozens of mobile devices, such as tablet PCs and PDAs, used by officers in the field.

Roberts says the cost efficiency of using the Citrix product came almost entirely from the department's end. “It's very expensive to travel to some of our offices so the cost was significantly reduced,” he says. “Whenever there is a patch we need to install, which typically takes place every six months, it is done in a matter of hours instead of days.”

From The Field

LoJack For Laptops

CompUSA, the computer retailer, has chosen the “LoJack for laptops” solution from Absolute Software Corp., Vancouver, to safeguard display laptops at retail locations throughout the U.S. In the event a display laptop is stolen or found missing, the software silently contacts a monitoring center when the computer connects to the Internet. The software provides the stolen computer's IP address and other networking information, with which investigators can work with local police to locate and recover the computer.

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