No downtime for Customs and Border Protection

The Customs and Border Protection agency’s IT operations can’t afford to be down. Did you know that for every minute of downtime, 764 people are backed up at borders, seaports or airports — points of entry into the Untied States?

“We can’t afford to ever shut down,” Kenneth Ritchhart, deputy assistant commissioner at CBP’s Office of Information and Technology, told attendees in October at the Oracle Federal Forum, held in Washington, D.C. A few years ago, airports shut down at night. But now, flights leave in the wee hours of the morning.

CBP, the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, processes about 1.1 million people entering the country daily. Congress wants the agency to process people entering and leaving, which would double the amount of people CBP handles, Ritchhart said.

“We process billions of records a day,” he said. “We actually do more transactions in two hours than the FBI does in a month.”