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Taser International Moves Police Body-Cam Storage to Microsoft Cloud

The Arizona-based Taser will switch its cloud storage provider from Amazon Web Services to Microsoft's Azure.

(TNS) -- Law-enforcement technology builder Taser International is jumping from Amazon.com to Microsoft for storing body-camera video and other sensitive data.

Taser and Microsoft on Monday announced a deal that makes Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing program the host of Taser’s video-storage and data-storage software. The companies say they will work together to build new programs that allow law-enforcement and criminal-justice workers to collect, store and share video and other data.

Previously, Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Taser stored its body-camera data with Amazon Web Services. Existing Taser customers who are using Amazon or another technology before Monday’s tie-up with Microsoft can continue using that service, the company said.

 

Amazon is the clear leader in the rapidly growing business of selling rented data storage and processing power via the Web. Microsoft has been spending billions of dollars a year in an effort to catch up. The Redmond company is widely seen as a credible challenger to Amazon, particularly when relying on the thousands of businesses and government agencies that already use some element of Microsoft technology.

Amazon Web Services brought in $2.1 billion in sales during the three months ended in September. Microsoft doesn’t disclose revenue for Azure, which includes some services that the AWS umbrella doesn’t. Walter Pritchard, a software analyst with Citigroup in San Francisco, estimated Azure’s quarterly sales at about $365 million during the just-completed quarter.

Body-worn cameras are a priority for law-enforcement agencies nationwide after a series of high-profile shootings involving police officers in the past year. The Seattle Police Department is currently testing body cameras.

The need to store that data, along with the growing trove of digital information produced by law-enforcement agencies, has pushed software companies and law-enforcement vendors to ramp up their Web-based offerings.

Microsoft last year touted a set of federal security standards that it said Azure had met, part of a bid to get government business.

One of Taser’s rivals in the business of building body cameras, Seattle’s Vievu, a unit of Safariland Group, also uses Microsoft’s Azure.

©2015 The Seattle Times Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.