Private Cloud

Can A Private Cloud Help Keep Buenos Aires Safe?

The Avenida 9 de Julio in Buenos Aires—called the world’s widest avenue—connects the waterfront and downtown of the Argentinian capitol to the surrounding residential communities. But even with 18 lanes (and a Metrobus corridor) running in two directions, the Avenida isn’t immune to traffic and congestion.
The population of the city nearly quadruples in size as “Every day, 12 million people come to Buenos Aires,” says Marucio Idiart, former CIO of the Argentinian Ministry of Security (Ministerio de Seguridad). “It’s a lot of traffic. So we must have a plan to deal with it.”
Unlike other cities in Argentina, which are patrolled by local police, Buenos Aires is under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Security and is protected by federal police. Their mission: to ensure that millions of people, residents and visitors, can safely move around the city. Whether that’s millions of commuters traveling the Avenida, tens of thousands of soccer fans leaving River Plate Stadium after a football match, or a family of tourists visiting the Puerto Madero Waterfront, the ministry must control and secure 78 square miles of urban streets.

The Argentinian Ministry of Security turned to a private cloud solution built on Oracle technology to help it control 78 square miles of Buenos Aires streets. (Source: Shutterstock)

“We have a law enforcement resource posted, on average, in every 600 square meters of the city,” says Idiart, who left the ministry when a new government came into power in December 2015. “The ministry patrols every block once every hour, and we control that activity from a central location.”
That central location—or rather, locations—is one of three command centers operated by the ministry in Buenos Aires. Police patrols, including traffic management, are handled from an IT-powered hub that tracks the location of every security resource in the city in real time. Other command centers support emergency response (via 911 calls) and interagency coordination (in the event of a large public event, catastrophe, or social unrest). All three command centers benefit from a private cloud solution built by the ministry on Oracle technology.

Public Service, Private Cloud
When former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner created the Ministry of Security in 2010, the executive team decided to integrate and update several existing applications into a single IT platform. This, however, was easier said than done: the system would have to support the work of various user roles—police officers on the street, operators in the call center, analysts at ministry headquarters, and dozens of others—with modern applications that are absolutely secure and online 24/7. “We are taking care of people’s lives, so it’s very important for the system to be online every hour, every second,” says Idiart.
To make this possible, Idiart’s team built a private cloud based on Oracle engineered systems (Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalytics), Oracle Database, and Oracle Business Intelligence solutions. This architecture allows the user base to operate on a common platform from a shared data center that is accessible only via a dedicated, secure network. User credentials can be defined based on job role to maintain the security and privacy of the data, and live data can move between the Ministry’s data center and the existing systems of aligned agencies.
“Every agency the ministry works with is independent, so they have their own data center,” says Idiart. “The ministry’s private cloud provides a layer of standardization, so our partners process their information locally and send away to our private cloud repository for use and analysis in real-time.”
The security group adds data from its own forces (for example, geolocation of federal police transmitted via 3G mobile technology) to that master data set that describes the state of security in Buenos Aires. Having this data all in one place allows the ministry to tailor applications that serve the various government staff charged with protecting the city.
City View
For the 911 command center and dispatch staff, Idiart’s team, working with Oracle partner Soflex, created a dashboard that shows a huge map of Buenos Aires and the density of emergency assistance calls throughout the city. While individual emergency operators help citizens with their specific problems (and dispatch help, as needed), the dashboard gives analysts and managers a big-picture view of the situation to help them determine if there is a trend or emerging crisis at a given location.
If, for instance, the command center receives 10 or 12 calls about a fire at a single address, those calls will appear in a cluster on the dashboard. With a quick look at the map, staff can determine that this is not a simple kitchen fire, but a larger building fire, and dispatch the emergency resources necessary to address the situation.
“This information is very important to the ministry, because it’s an easy way for 911 teams to see where the problems are in the city,” say Idiart. “This not only helps get our citizens the help they need quickly, but allows the ministry to deliver the proper resources to address the emergency.” And the system has translated into measurable improvements in service delivery. Emergency calls are now addressed within six seconds and emergency resources are delivered within three minutes.
Social Patrol
The same applies to the system that manages the ministry’s police patrols. According to Idiart, the patrol plans change every week but must maintain the same service level (a police resource available every 600 square meters, every block patrolled once an hour) regardless of the path they take. Those plans must also adapt to the ebb and flow of daily life—such as the impact of commute times and the dismissal of children from school in the afternoon. Add to that the dispatch of police to deal with the occurrence of crime, and it’s clear that patrol managers have their work cut out for them.
Ministry analysts use Oracle Business Intelligence solutions to review the effectiveness of police patrols and adapt plans to produce better outcomes. Successful patrol routes are stored within the private cloud so the system can recommend models for optimum patrolling. Real-time position data is displayed on a map (similar to the 911 dashboard) so managers can ensure they are delivering the best response to an incident.
And according to Idiart, optimizing these patrol routes can be a matter of life and death. “If there is a difference between the real location of a patrol and what the system says, agents may not dispatch the nearest vehicle to save that life. So the viability of the information is very, very important.”
To ensure emergency patrols have the best information possible, Idiart says his team is augmenting its data with information gathered by external sources. One vital—and increasingly important—data source is social media. According to a study conducted by WeAreSocial, Argentinians are among the world’s most active users of social media, with 71 percent of the population actively using the internet and spending 3.2 hours per day consuming social media (approaching double the global average). Idiart and his team saw this as a significant opportunity to extend the value of the Ministry of Security’s data set.
“In Argentina, the use of social media is very marked,” he says. “For young people, it may not occur to them to call 911 to report an incident—but they may take a photo and post it on Facebook, Google+, or Twitter. So the ministry has to seriously consider these channels.”
Idiart says the ministry is using Oracle Social Cloud to recover data from social networks and putting that data within the context of the other data in its systems. That not only allows the ministry to anticipate or validate the data it receives via 911 calls and police patrols, it also aids in the investigation of crimes such as drug dealing and human trafficking, where social networks play an integral role in the planning and execution of a crime.
But Idiart recognizes that his team is just one part of a coordinated plan to keep the people of Buenos Aires safe. And that data, however powerful, is just one tool the Ministry of Security uses to achieve that goal. “At the end it’s the people who make the decisions,” he says. “I am an IT guy, but I recognize the importance of the human resources. Our goal was not to automate law enforcement, but to give people advanced tools to do law enforcement.