The national police support agency Crimtrac has moved its DNA databases into CCTV-monitored pods at hosting provider Canberra Data Centres.
The government agency pulled its servers from the Defence Computing Bureau to a co-location provider this month in a move said to cut costs and bolster its carbon-cutting measures.
Crimtrac spokesman Nicholas Page said it will cut its power bill in half, require 50 per cent less space, and save some 50,000 litres of water a day.
“The servers are located within a secure area of the data centre — it’s a data centre within a data centre,” Page said.
“Our security guys have complete control over who enters the area [and] monitor with electronic surveillance.
“The [Defence Computing Bureau] is a secondary data centre that now works as fail-over.”
The migration to the “clean, green and secure” Canberra data centre was officiated by Minister of Home Affairs Brendan O’Connor today.
Crimtrac houses data from the National Automated Fingerprint Identification System, the National Police Reference System, the National Criminal Investigation DNA Database and the Australian National Child Offender Register within the Canberra Data Centres building in the suburb of Hume.
O’Conner said the data centre will ensure the nation’s 50,000 police officers have “easy and reliable” access to the databases.
The Australian Security Information Office will conduct yearly audits and random security assessments to ensure the data centre meeting government requirements.
Last month, CrimTrac kicked-off an overhaul its extranet and move to the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 suite of software tools after releasing a January.