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Public safety and other critical-infrastructure agencies responsible for providing mission-critical and lifesaving services to their communities must be able to do so under any circumstances. To ensure that they are able to maintain operations, agencies develop continuity-of-operations (COOP) and disaster-recovery (DR) plans to help mitigate the impact of a crisis. What these plans often forget, however, is how an agency will communicate with its stakeholders, both internal and external, during a crisis.

The COVID-19 global pandemic has thrust cloud computing into the spotlight, with everything from primary education, to business meetings, to government operations moving “into the cloud.” We’ve highlighted how the benefits of cloud-based applications are clear: lower total cost of ownership, enhanced scalability and flexibility, and the ability to shift the maintenance responsibility to the service provider. Cloud-based applications are easy to update, are available anywhere network connectivity exists, and often are more secure and reliable than a premises-based solution.

Continuity-of-operations plans (COOP) represent a significant investment of time and resources. However, COOPs are also critical to maintaining a mission-critical agency’s operations during and after a natural or manmade event— including, but not limited to, tornadoes, hurricanes, pandemics, and terrorist attacks. While it is impossible to prevent or predict these events, having a COOP in place can help mitigate the effects of such disasters—ultimately enabling an agency to maintain critical operations when communities need them most.

In a recent post, I touched upon some of the novel ways that the public safety community has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this post I’ll explore some of the most important lessons that have been learned.

First and foremost, all public safety agencies need continuity-of-operations (COOP) and disaster-recovery (DR) plans. We have roughly 150 subject-matter experts, and as they travel the country supporting clients, they often discover the complete lack of such plans and/or they come to realize that they haven’t been updated for quite some time. This always amazes me. Every agency should have such plans. As Benjamin Franklin said, “by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” While the pandemic has brought this need into sharp focus, there are many events—tornados, floods, earthquakes, wildfires, hurricanes, hazmat incidents—that could render an emergency communications center inoperable, inaccessible or uninhabitable.