What were the key objectives of this project? 

• Consolidation of multiple existing and legacy systems, replacing them with a single front end for functionality, including but not limited to the management of cases, custody, intelligence and property management.  More efficient policing systems mean more time for actual police work. 

• Ability to extend and expand the system to cater for additional functionality and development of the architecture to cater for new and emerging use-cases / requirements. 

• Provide a dynamic Analytics and Reporting capability across multiple data sources.  

• Future Proofing of the overall service implementation to support and enable the clients’ datacentre and cloud strategies, integration and information sharing with other Government organisations and adherence to multiple security accreditation requirements. 

• Enable secure consumption of the service by users from mobile devices.  

• The programme went to market in order to compete a set of Business Requirements and choose a Commercial product with appropriate vendor support capable of meeting the requirements with appropriate interfaces, integration and development activities. 

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Our involvement

• i15's involvement with this project began during 2016 when it was engaged to research the requirements of the client in order to develop a set of functional and non-functional technical requirements for the solution that could be shared with potential bidders

• Targeted research and market analysis was then required in order to review and score proposals from multiple bidders in order to identify the most appropriate product choices for the deployment of this service whilst proactively identifying potential barriers to adoption, leading to the selection of a product set in 2018 

• Throughout 2018, we were engaged to provide Enterprise Architecture Designs and Patterns to cater for various aspects including: 

• Management and Migration of Data from existing systems into the new service with consideration to ETL methods paying particular attention to the unique challenges around data integrity and consistency for ‘chain of evidence’ and other considerations

• Adoption and Integration of technologies, new to the client, which were not suited to the environment in their native form and so required special treatment for successful integration

• Security advice, design and accreditation of proposed solution 

• Network designs to enable secure integration with internal and external partners and data sources 

• Design of hosting infrastructure and collaboration with product vendors in order to agree required enhancements or design changes to meet the constraints and overcome barriers to adoption that are unique to this client due to its dependencies on some 3rd party systems or other restrictions that cannot be changed in required timescales of this programme

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• Through 2019 we have been focused on the successful integration, deployment and ongoing management of the hosting and infrastructure components for this service. This includes, automation of software deployments and upgrades, design and integration of monitoring toolsets, security hardening of host Operating System, bespoke deployment and configuration to provide increased availability through improved resilience and Disaster Recovery techniques not currently  used by other deployments of the application in question  

• Deployment patterns that enable horizontal and vertical scaling up and down as well as portability for Datacentre and Cloud Migrations in order to enable successful delivery against our clients emerging strategies in these areas 

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Technologies involved

Cisco Network Hardware, switches 

F5 Load Balancing 

Dell/EMC storage for Block,File,S3 

X64 Server hardware, VMWare Virtualisation 

Linux and Windows Operating Systems 

Docker Containerisation, UCP, DTR, Virtualised Networks 

Oracle RAC, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, ETL tools 

LDAP, Active Directory, ADFS 

Ansible, Jenkins, OpenNMS, Grafana 

Ensemble, ActiveMQ, Apache Tomcat, Apache Shiboleth, Java 

MS Direct Access,  Laptops, tablets, Android devices

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