NSW Police turns to cloud to catch traffic violators

New police technology to catch and punish traffic violators is being processed at Amazon Web Services.

The police force is undertaking a four-week field trial of a mobile app for officers to issue traffic infringement notices.

The tool was developed by Sydney and Melbourne-based company Gridstone.

The trial project, which has been in preparation since early this year and runs until the end of this month, has seen officers supplied with 20 customised and locked down Apple iPad Minis running the Mobile Notices app.

Gridstone director Lembit Pikkat said because the trial dealt with "highly sensitive personal information", security was paramount.

The data is processed by middleware hosted on the AWS public cloud at its data centre in Sydney and is only stored for the duration of the transaction. It is then deleted from both the device and the cloud servers.

According to Gridstone, "The AWS servers, and the connections made to NSW Government’s internal systems, meet state government regulations with regards to information protection."

A Gridstone spokesperson told CRN that AWS offered speed and security.

"As this is a proof of concept, one of the objectives was to implement and test the cloud platform to meet the strict standards around security and interoperability that NSW Police have in place," he told CRN.

"The speed of implementation has been a great advantage to both Gridstone and NSW Police to allow a proof of concept to be built in a relatively short timeframe.

Asked how the AWS cloud service suited the privacy and security required, the spokesperson said: "Generally speaking, if a cloud solution conforms to the end user's own set of security and governance policies and standards, that represents an acceptable level of comfort with regards to security."

According to Gridstone, Mobile Notices lets officers perform secure, live lookups of vehicle registration, licence and other information in NSW Police’s central system - the Computerised Operational Policing System (COPS) - automatically capture location data, and attach photos.

Karen McCarthy, superintendent at NSW Police, said Mobile Notice is expected to save 240,000 police hours and $1.2 million per year.