Ohio’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation is moving its biometric identification system from an on-premises installation to NEC’s Integra-ID 7 software-as-a-service platform, hosted in Microsoft Azure Government Cloud.
The upgrade, undertaken through the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, began in 2026 and is expected to take less than nine months, according to NEC. It replaces the state’s existing Integra-ID multimodal biometric identification environment with a fully managed cloud service.
The bureau operates the Ohio Automated Biometric Identification System, which supports criminal background checks and investigations by state and local law enforcement agencies. NEC says the system contains more than six million biometric records, connects to nearly 600 livescan fingerprint capture systems and integrates with eight local automated fingerprint identification systems and the FBI’s Next Generation Identification system.
Ohio’s system processes fingerprints, palmprints and mugshots. Authorized personnel can use a secure browser on a Windows 11 workstation for statewide access, administration, monitoring and reporting.
NEC previously replaced Ohio’s legacy fingerprint identification and computerized criminal history systems in 2021 following a competitive procurement. That project included migration of tenprint records, latent fingerprints, palmprints and mugshots. The new upgrade changes how the biometric platform is hosted and maintained.
NEC says the Azure Government deployment provides U.S.-based data residency and aligns with the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Security Policy. The managed service is intended to provide software enhancements, biometric algorithm updates and security fixes without the separate upgrade cycles associated with the previous installation.
Integra-ID 7 supports multiple biometric modalities, including fingerprints, palmprints, facial recognition and iris recognition. NEC’s everBlu update framework supplies continuing algorithm and software releases through the service. Eugene le Roux, senior vice president at NEC National Security Systems, said the arrangement is designed to give agencies access to improvements without the complexity of traditional system upgrades.
The deployment follows the Western Identification Network’s selection of Integra-ID 7 for a cloud modernization project serving multiple western states. NEC’s law-enforcement product suite, including Integra-ID, also previously obtained Texas TX-RAMP Level 2 certification for cloud security.
In Ohio, the bureau will continue using the platform to support criminal-record management and biometric identification across connected agencies. The migration brings those operations onto a managed government-cloud environment with ongoing software and security updates.
Sources: Business Wire via MarketMinute
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
