We think of cloud computing as a novel 21st century invention, but NEC was hosting cloud systems when cloud wasn’t cool.
If you’ve ever heard of the Western Identification Network, you know what I mean.
Look back before Amazon and Microsoft and others offered cloud computing capability. A number of Western states, mostly with low populations, banded together to form the Western Identification Network (WIN). The states shared computing power from a location in California.
“In January 1988, criminal justice administrators from ten western states met in Boise, Idaho, to determine the feasibility of developing a multi-state Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS)…. In June 1989, the funding was appropriated by legislatures in Alaska, California, Idaho, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming to create the first multi-state AFIS network.”
NEC has provided biometric services to WIN ever since. This despite my best efforts as a MorphoTrak employee to win the contract from NEC over a decade ago. (But that’s another story.) It would take a couple of more years for MorphoTrak to sell its own cloud offering.
But as NEC is moving its Ohio biometric system to Microsoft Azure Government Cloud, it may also be moving WIN away from its California servers to the Microsoft Azure Government Cloud. It’s a little unclear with WIN’s new Integra-ID 7 system will reside on Microsoft servers or in NEC’s existing server center. I’m trying to pin this down.
