BACKGROUND:
The Automated Regional Information Exchange System (ARIES) is a software application owned by Contra Costa County, and used by the County and other law enforcement agencies to manage criminal justice data collected from law enforcement agencies. ARIES manages the data provided by local law enforcement agencies that is stored on the County servers. ARIES serves more than 9,106 users from over 93 different agencies. The projects serve to renew critical infrastructure, enhance system redundancy and expand capacity for growing demand. Dell is the vendor who will supply the equipment to support these projects. Dell has experience partnering with government agencies of all sizes to help deliver IT services that improve delivery and reduce costs. In addition to Dell’s reputation amongst government agencies, the Office of the Sheriff –Technical Services has a long history of working with the Dell’s equipment and infrastructure environment. It would be to ARIES’ advantage to leverage the knowledge, skills and experience that the Technical Services unit has accumulated over the years by working with Dell.
CONSEQUENCE OF NEGATIVE ACTION:
Continued use of the servers after its manufacturer’s warranty has expired introduces the greatest danger to ARIES’ continuity. If parts fail, ARIES has no guarantee parts can be procured. Security exploits may no longer be patched. Vendors may stop supporting and offering software that the equipment needs and depends on. Due to these reasons and more, it’s critical to replace the current expired infrastructure.
The purpose of enhancing system redundancy is to duplicate the critical components of ARIES system with the intention of increasing reliability of the servers. Currently there is no redundancy infrastructure in place to protect ARIES from destructive activity. If this purchase is not approved, there is no plan in place to ensure that essential data processing operational tasks can be conducted after the disruption and unable to facilitate the rapid restoration of a data processing system following an interruption.