Today’s unmanned aircraft systems — better known as drones — can be programmed to accomplish a slew of important jobs. In fact, drones are poised to radically improve many public safety applications, from fire departments using drones with sensors to locate people trapped by fire, to rescue teams sending drones to locate lost hikers in our vast national parks — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Drones themselves are already highly sophisticated and largely commodity technologies. What makes a drone application special are the sensors, software, flight services and data analytics that users bring to bear.

Not that long ago, most police cruisers had a single internet-connected device: a rugged, in-vehicle laptop that allowed officers to securely connect to back-end servers, run license plate numbers and check for outstanding warrants. Today, the number of connected devices in a cruiser is limited only by police officials’ imaginations — or by the in-vehicle…

State and local governments host vast amounts of sensitive data — nothing top secret, but information that contains the intimate details of their citizens’ lives: children’s school records, driving records, voter registration information, contacts with police and paramedics, the list goes on. As more communities lean on the internet and the cloud to create efficiencies…

FirstNet. 4K. 5G. Drones. These are just a few examples of the numerous emerging technologies that every public safety agency will have to consider in the coming years. As the business lead for strategic markets at CDW, I work with fire, police, emergency medical services and other agencies to help them understand their options, which…

Radios in cars might seem like an antique artifact in 2018, but they were an important first step in the evolution to the connected vehicle future that we’re racing toward. For certain jobs, work is always on the go, and the demands of this work can’t be constrained by a desk or a desktop computer….

It was my honor to again attend the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Technology Conference — an annual exposition and education event formerly known as Law Enforcement Information Management (LEIM) — along with my colleagues in CDW’s government and public safety practice. The conference always affords us a great opportunity to meet with…