This year has brought a lot of change, and excitement, to the public safety industry. From the announcement of 911 grant funding for states and tribal nations to advance their efforts to implement next generation 911 (NG911) to an increased, industry-wide focus on cybersecurity and preventing cyberattack, the groundwork has been laid for continued improvement for emergency response in 2020 and beyond.
Today, more public safety agencies are taking a serious look at how they can mitigate the risk of cyberattacks due to the dramatic spike in ransomware attacks on state and local governments. Such attacks often result in hefty ransom demands, with reports of demands as high as $400,000. One of the most well-known ransomware attacks of 2019 impacted 22 municipalities in Texas, with hackers requesting more than two million dollars in ransom payment to unlock the data.
For decades, public safety has suffered from a siloed approach to implementing communications networks, one that has made interoperable communications an extremely challenging, costly and time-consuming endeavor, and in some cases, a proverbial “mission impossible.” An opportunity exists to flip the script, one that MCP will explore in depth in a new live webinar scheduled to be held on October 31 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern/11 a.m. Pacific.
The State of Florida recently enacted legislation that has considerable implications for public safety agencies. The law was introduced after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission, an organization formed to analyze the 2018 events of the Parkland, Florida, high school shooting, highlighted several opportunities to improve public safety communications within the state.
Last week, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) and the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) took the final, much-anticipated step in awarding funding dollars that have been in the works since the Next Generation 911 Advancement Act was announced seven years ago. Originally passed as part of the Middle-Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012, the new $109 million grant program is intended to drive the 911 community’s transition to Next Generation 911 (NG911.)
Last year, the 911 Center that serves Harford County, Maryland, was having a hard time recruiting and retaining telecommunicators, a problem that is quite common in emergency communications centers (ECCs) across the country.
Vendor consolidations happen all the time across all business sectors, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it is to eliminate the competition. Other times it is to expand into new markets. Still other times it is to acquire new technology—generally, it is far less expensive and time-consuming for a company to acquire technology than to develop it on its own.
If you didn’t travel to Orlando last week for the annual National Emergency Number Association (NENA) conference, it can be summed up with one word: progress. The key themes were industry advancement and innovation with several game-changing technologies and initiatives being launched.
Throughout the design, development, and implementation of Next Generation 911 (NG911), one fundamental requirement has remained true: to achieve interoperability across the entire public safety communications ecosystem, NG911 implementations must adhere to a standard. For many years now, the 911 community has agreed that the NG911 standard is the National Emergency Number Association’s (NENA) Detailed Functional and Interface Standards for the NENA i3 Solution[1], commonly known as "NENA i3."
The first version of the standard, NENA 08-003, was ratified in June 2011. Since then, the standard was renumbered as NENA-STA-010.2-2016 when it was last updated in 2016. Later this year, NENA plans to revise the standard yet again expects American National Standards Institute (ANSI) ratification once again.
Do not be alarmed—those are not storm clouds on the horizon.
What you are seeing is the front line of cloud-based solutions entering the 911 technology marketplace. While cloud-based computing in its current form has been used effectively for more than a decade in non-public-safety markets, the 911 community has been glacier-like in adopting this technology. This largely is because 911 officials have been reticent to trust that cloud-hosted solutions can meet the rigorous demands of operating 24 x 7 x 365 with high reliability and availability—which is essential in a 911 center.However, cloud solutions have proved that they can achieve this high standard with other mission-critical entities, such as National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Department of Defense missile systems. They also have proved to be quite advantageous from implementation, maintenance, scalability, disaster-recovery and cost perspectives.
The first 911 call was made 51 years ago in Alabama. That call marked a significant technological advancement that enabled citizens to activate an emergency response much quicker and more efficiently than ever before. Since then, public safety officials have continued to leverage communications technology advancements to make emergency response even more efficient and effective. These include the advent of Enhanced 911 (E911) service, digital land mobile radio (LMR) networks, and the introduction of computer-aided dispatch (CAD) systems and mapping applications. The counterbalance is that these advancements occurred in distinct silos that developed within the emergency communications ecosystem.
Topics: Emergency Response Ecosystem
Being an early adopter in the public safety/emergency response community is a wonderful thing. It is exhilarating to be on the leading edge of technology innovation, especially when one is steeped in the belief that such innovation will save many more lives—which happens to be the public safety communications community’s business.
However, as with most things in life, there is a flip side to this coin, which is that it not always easy to be an early adopter. To pull it off one needs not only considerable vision and drive, but also an equal measure of fortitude.
Recently I moderated a panel discussion regarding a pilot project conducted earlier this year that explored how social media data could be leveraged to enhance emergency response. (If you missed this free webinar, it is archived here. I urge you to take the time to view it—a lot of great information was presented on a very interesting project.)
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