Geneva - A Federation In A Box
Geneva Systems Group Inc. presents its Geneva Integration Framework, a complete Federation In A Box for secure, reliable, scalable real-time integration of CAD, RMS, Fire, Jail, Court and other data systems.
When you bring together disparate organizations such as police and fire, or city and county, you are creating a federation. There are many problems to solve: How do you route information to an appropriate destination? How do you control which data gets shared and which does not? How do you format that data? How do you code that data? How do you ensure that it actually gets to its destination? How do you make your system scale? How do you secure the data cryptographically? How do you ensure that different agencies can securely exchange the keys necessary to make the encrypted data usable? How do you ensure that agencies can securely identify the source of a request or of data? How can you identify and "vet" users of the data? How can you ensure that, at the fundamental transport level, the transmissions are secure? How can you provide for technical oversight, management, etc.?
Your CAD and Records vendors will help you with connecting to their systems. But that's the easy part. You're on your own with the rest - the hard part. The Feds and others will provide you with guidelines on how to proceed, but this part of integration projects often takes years and the price tag is beyond most budgets. In fact, many projects fail even after years of effort and huge amounts of money.
With Geneva, everything needed for a federation infrastructure is built in.
Architecture & Technology
Without Geneva, a neutral third party, each of your vendors must create, deploy and maintain an interface to each connected system - a costly disaster in the making. With Geneva there is a single Geneva Gateway for each connected system, providing for all the connectivity requirements of that system.
Geneva Gateways can connect to any system using whatever technology is appropriate, such as proprietary APIs, relational databases, Web Services, file dumps, etc.
Global/Justice Reference Architecture
Geneva is a perfect fit with the DOJ's Global Reference Architecture (GRA), formerly Justice Reference Architecture (JRA): Gateways communicate using Web Services; exchange NIEM data; provide both transport and data encryption, etc.
Geneva's standards-compliance alphabet soup includes: GRA/JRA, NIEM, GFIPM, N-Dex, LEITSC/IACP, CJIS, SOA and more.
Security
Per CJIS guidelines, data is encrypted at its point of origin and remains so until reaching its destination(s). Encryption, which is applied to all data, is FIPS 140-2 (CJIS) compliant. For double effectiveness we also use transport-level encryption.
Geneva also supports the DOJ's Global Federated Identity and Permissions Management (GFIPM) standard for exchanging digitally-signed SAML tokens for managing identity and permissions in a federated system.
In fact, Geneva provides a complete, built-in cryptographic trust for managing secure exchanges.
Local Control
Many integration projects fail when local agencies are forced to cede control of their important and sensitive data to somebody else. With Geneva, local agencies retain control of their data. Each agency approves or rejects subscription requests; if the local system must be polled periodically for data the local agency gets to decide that schedule; local agencies get to decide which other agencies and what user profiles get to see certain sensitive data; etc.
Scalability
Geneva scales to any requirement, from very large, highly available and reliable, high-traffic clustered systems to the smallest of systems with lightweight needs.
COTS
Today there are few COTS integration solutions. So every county in the US, if it wants integration, has to do it all from scratch: design the system "backbone," agree on the protocols, create/adopt NIEM IEPDs for data exchange, create a cryptographic trust for exchange of secure keys and for digital signitures, design and implement federated permissions management - the list goes on and on. Your project could take many years and cost a fortune.
With Geneva, most of that stuff is built right in. You need network infrastructure and a place to host virtual machines - and depending on CJIS data requirements that could even be in the cloud. Gateways to connect to some systems are off the shelf, but some may need to be customized. Your integration project can happen quickly and inexpensively.