Print Version - Arizona Judicial Department

Infrastructure Maintenance continues to play a critical part of the overall shared
infrastructure and shared services required to support the basic court operations and
related programs on a day-to-day basis. Along with “Automation Training and Support”
(PC deployment, field support, help desk), it represents the foundation of the Judicial
Branch’s automation efforts. The key components include shared communications
network and associated services (e-mail, business process workflow, and information
access), data center, database administration, security, and disaster recovery.
Infrastructure Maintenance primarily involves on-going maintenance and support,
though various projects, to upgrade servers and network bandwidth.
The Arizona Judicial Information Network (AJIN) has been established as the means by
which court data can be exchanged within and between counties and State-level
agencies. As statewide strategic applications have been deployed, the capacity needs
placed upon AJIN have risen considerably. Newer applications and devices connected
on the network demand more intelligence, requiring upgrades of the established
networking infrastructure. Thus, additional investment and planning must continue to be
made in AJIN as long as it is to be the Judicial Branch’s enterprise network. Refer to the
appendices for an identification of the servers and software (both desktop and serverbased
applications and server operating systems) that make up AJIN.
Major goals over the next several years include increasing security within the AJIN
network environment; increasing capacity to remote locations using Cisco’s Wide Area
Application Services (WAAS) and Network Area Storage (NAS) device, continuing to
quickly expand onto QMOE technology giving the AOC greater bandwidth and more
flexibility to grow the AJIN network; as well as enhancing anti-virus and malware
protection. In addition, services will include growth in server virtualization and virtual
machine mobility, server clustering technologies for rapid server recoverability,
increased system and application error monitoring and alerting capabilities, and
upgraded/expanded storage area networks (SANs) to improve integrated and
automated business management performance.
Server virtualization provides the opportunity to reduce cost and energy requirements,
increase agility, speed deployment, and leverage data center space because servers no
longer need to be procured, installed, cabled up, and connected to the rest of the
infrastructure. This enables rapid deployment of a production, development, or testing
environment or creation of ‘sandboxes’ to assess specific functions such as load testing.
Virtualization also takes into account the larger impacts due to failures of underlying
hardware, tracking software licensing compliance, and the unnecessary consumption of
server resources for those more lightly used VMs.
SECURITY AND DISASTER RECOVERY
Reliability and security of the Arizona Judicial Information Network (AJIN) is of primary
importance. As a result, several ongoing statewide initiatives, continue to occur, to
address the maintenance and security of AJIN. As part of these ongoing efforts,
network equipment refreshes take place, insuring the latest technologies and tools are
deployed at each location on the AJIN network.
ARIZONA JUDICIAL BRANCH | INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY STRATEGIC PLAN: 2013-2015 166