Looking Beyond the Brick and Mortar

Profound challenges often spur great progress. The COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. Not only is the public safety community staring an enormous challenge in the face, but also is looking at a tremendous opportunity to move the community forward.

Traditionally, public safety has been slow to adopt new technologies and embrace new strategies. However, the pandemic has forced agencies to do things they likely would not have contemplated before. The collection of new concepts not only will enable public safety to handle the pandemics and mega-disasters of the future, but also will enhance day-to-day operations personnel performance. Public safety is up to the challenge, as long as officials can get comfortable with being uncomfortable for a while.

What the Public Safety Community Can Learn From the COVID-19 Pandemic

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.

If You Do Nothing Else, Implement Multifactor Authentication to Head Off Cyberattacks

MCP’s NetInform solution leverages a variety of tools that enable our subject-matter experts to assess our clients’ communications network security postures. That assessment includes looking for vulnerabilities that could allow a bad actor to gain access to the network and then navigate through it, seeking opportunities to perform cyberattacks. Typically, a lot of vulnerabilities exist, and they’re not always easy to see. It can be something as simple as a network port being left open by a service technician after the work is done, or a former employee’s account is still active long after they left. This is problematic because numerous, easy-to-use scanning programs are readily available to hackers that enable them to probe an organization’s network to discover every open port, i.e., breach point, and attempt access.

Whitepaper Cautions Against Using TIGER Data for GIS Data Development

Geographic information system (GIS) data is a foundational component in the migration to, and continuing operation of, Next Generation 911 (NG911) systems.

But developing local GIS data so that it aligns with NG911 standards is a laborious and time-consuming process that can take months or years to complete.

How to Keep GIS Institutional Knowledge From Walking Out the Door

Every once in a while, the geographic information system (GIS) professional working for one of our clients retires, which is great for the pro—and equally bad for the client.

GIS has been important in the public safety community for a couple of decades now. The data generated by such systems is leveraged by computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system mapping applications to pinpoint the location of 911 callers on telecommunicator screen displays. In the Next Generation 911 (NG911) environment, to which many emergency communications centers (ECCs) are migrating, GIS-generated geospatial data will replace the legacy automatic location identification (ALI) and master street address guide (MSAG) databases to locate emergency callers. The result will be fewer misdirected 911 calls and timelier dispatching of the appropriate emergency response. When lives are on the line and every second counts, this is a good thing.

One Way To Keep Public Safety Technology Procurements from Derailing

Emergency communications centers need a lot of gear. They need wireless communications systems to communicate with first responders in the field. They need call-handling systems to process 911 calls. They need computer-aided dispatch systems, as well as mapping and automatic vehicle location applications, to dispatch the appropriate emergency response. And those are just the backbone systems. The ECC technology ecosystem that enables effective emergency response is quite expansive.

The Case for Private Long-Term Evolution Networks for Power Utilities

Next month, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is expected to vote on reconfiguring the 900 MHz band for the deployment of broadband services and technologies. This is an important issue that Mission Critical Partners (MCP) has been tracking for some time, and we are encouraged to see a conclusion on the horizon. 

Why COOP/DR Plans Need to Consider GIS Data Maintenance

A couple of weeks ago, MCP’s Richard Gaston posted about why it is critically important for every public-safety agency, regardless of size and resources, to have continuity-of-operations plans (COOP) and disaster-recovery (DR) plans in place. This post addresses an element that is lacking in many such plans, a gap that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus—geographic information system (GIS) data maintenance.

For decades, location of 911 callers was determined solely by querying the master street address guide (MSAG) and automatic location identification (ALI) tabular databases. About a quarter century ago, GIS-generated data entered the picture—quite literally—as computer-aided dispatch (GIS) system mapping applications began to leverage it to depict 911-caller locations on the map display on telecommunicators’ screens. In the Next Generation 911 (NG911) environment, GIS data will play an even bigger role, because geospatial data will replace MSAG and ALI data as the primary means of locating 911 callers.

Public Safety Cybersecurity Threat Advisory: Critical VMware Bug

As part of our effort to inform our clients about potential and serious cybersecurity issues, MCP provides advisories about vulnerabilities and exploits that could threaten the operations of their public safety communications networks. Sign up to receive these advisories in your inbox as soon as they are released.

This week, there is a new critical alert that requires the public safety community’s immediate attention.

Assessing Progress Towards Next Generation 911 is No Easy Task

In 2015, while beginning work on the Next Generation 911 (NG911) Nationwide Cost Study for the National 911 Program, it became apparent that the first step was to determine the extent of implementations across the country. Only then could the team define what would be needed to fully implement NG911, from coast to coast, and the ultimate cost.

Pandemic Underscores Importance of Public Safety Continuity-Of-Operations and Disaster-Recovery Plans

COVID-19, aka the coronavirus, pandemic is grabbing a lot of attention right now, partly because we don’t see global pandemics in the United States very often, certainly not one of this gravity. But we do see other significant events on a fairly regular basis— e.g., wildfires, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, hazardous materials spills, network outages—that can disrupt or halt public safety operations.

The Role of LTE in the Utilities Sector

Southern Company is one of the largest investor-owned utilities in the United States, covering a large portion of the southeast. The company is known for being an early adopter of telecommunications technologies. Its subsidiaries include Southern Telecom and Southern Linc, companies dedicated to serving the telecommunications needs of power subsidiaries and charged with reselling any surplus capacity to outside entities. The Southern-owned, multistate, Motorola Integrated Digital Enhanced Network (iDEN) primarily was used by energy companies, but also by other commercial enterprises and even by some public safety entities.