The Forecast at OJP

The Office of Justice Programs is reaping the benefits of the cloud, but is still in the middle of its implementation.

Today, the agency provides hosted applications, virtual machines, storage, offsite data backup and other services to OJP's seven bureaus and offices, including the Bureau of Justice Assistance, National Institute of Justice and the Office for Victims of Crime. The bureaus and offices can increase or decrease computing resources as their needs change.

In the next year, the agency's plans include migrating eight remaining mission-critical applications to the cloud.

Right now, users can access cloud applications through OJP's Rockville, Md., and Washington, D.C. data centers, but the agency is working to also allow public access from its Dallas data center, which will speed application delivery in the Midwest and on the West Coast. The agency currently replicates data to all three sites in near-real time, but as budget allows, the IT staff hopes to replicate in real time.