provided by: 
In the critical moments after a lone gunman opened fire on students and faculty at Virginia Tech with tragic results, school and law enforcement officials struggled with whom to contact, how to reach them and what information to relay. The confusion and chaos that ensued illustrated the dire need for college and university officials to deploy an emergency notification system to quickly notify students and faculty members when an emergency strikes.
But what are the best methods for communicating to a large, geographically dispersed population? And, how can college and university staff increase the likelihood that students and faculty will receive the critical information sent?
These are tough questions that the Department of Defense has struggled with for many years. The importance of emergency alerting for DoD facility protection has been most recently illustrated by the Commander of the Navy Installation Command (CNIC) which reviewed the cost effectiveness of more than 20 physical security technologies. CNIC concluded that warning systems are one of the two most effective capabilities for facility and personnel protection.
The DoD has improved its emergency alerting capabilities dramatically within the past few years by focusing on the internet protocol (IP) network as the mechanism to quickly alert personnel regarding emergency situations. Network-centric warning systems allow military officials to effectively and immediately communicate with all at-risk personnel via multiple and redundant means of communications — computer networks, shared computer kiosks, text-messaging to wireless devices, telephony (including VoIP) and more traditional forms of alerting such as public address systems.
Colleges and universities can do the same to heighten situational awareness and improve facility security and personnel protection. Deploying IWSAlerts from provider AtHoc, for example, gives university officials the ability to activate and manage all alerting capabilities — desktops, laptops, text messages, pages, Blackberry, e-mail, fax — using a network-centric application and Web-based interface. Essentially, the application integrates disparate public announcement (PA), networks and phone systems, creating a comprehensive alerting platform.
Emergency notification systems enable university officials to communicate with first responders and all affected personnel to supply appropriate emergency information, provide required response actions and monitor personnel status. During times of emergency, these systems become an instantaneous, pervasive and cost-efficient mass-warning system, reaching any network-connected device via intrusive popup alerts.
Evaluating Emergency Alerting within the Bigger Picture
The emergency response community can work most effectively through information sharing. Enterprise-class alerting platforms create a virtual ecosystem of emergency response by making it possible for any organization receiving information about an emergency to alert all related parties, organizations and facilities. For example, in an emergency situation, a university campus could alert local police, fire and medical services, or another campus. In emergency alerting, an integrated system is an effective one.
To understand the different levels of alert distribution, colleges and universities can look to the Air Force's Air University as an example.
The Air University, located on Maxwell Air Force Base, provides higher education options to Air Force enlisted and civilian personnel. Maxwell AFB, including the Air University, has deployed a facility-level alerting system. When an emergency occurs on base — whether inclement weather or a potential attack — the Maxwell command post can quickly notify all base personnel, university staff and students with alerts sent to computer desktops and other network-enabled devices.
Though the base can address facility-level alerts, on occasion, a situation will warrant a larger response. In these instances, Maxwell may need to alert another base within the Air Education and Training Command (AETC), the organization Maxwell AFB is part of. Because AETC adopted a standard alerting system for use at all of its bases, any single base can alert others as well as quickly communicate with headquarters. This can be accomplished within the same user interface that launches the alert to Maxwell. Though in this instance the alerts are being sent to another Air Force base, in a civilian scenario, alerts can automatically be sent to police, fire, rescue and community alerting systems.
Another area of emergency alerting DoD systems address that has not yet been included in the national dialog is the concept of monitoring threat information. Though not all threats will be detected in advance, some can, and for those that are being tracked, facilities will be able to dramatically improve response by knowing what's occurring.
Organizations such as the U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) illustrate what's possible on this front. USSTRATCOM's global operations center uses emergency alerting technology to improve situational awareness through information monitoring and targeted alerting. The command deploys a network-based, user alerting system to monitor a set of databases, content feeds and sensors for strategic threats and conditions and deliver real-time alerts to decision makers based on their roles, self-subscriptions and need-to-know status. These notifications drive situational awareness and enable decision makers to effectively manage critical events and emergencies.
This type of capability improves inbound emergency gathering which, in turn, improves decision-making and outbound communications.
Whether a facility needs to protect itself, work within a larger system, increase coordination with local authorities or simply improve processes for receiving emergency information from external sources, there are cost-effective options available. The time has come for colleges and universities to apply the same level of attention as the military has to protecting campuses through emergency notifications.
Guy Miasnik is the president and CEO of AtHoc Inc., a provider of enterprise-class, network-centric alerting systems for emergency notifications, force protection, facility protection, public safety, situational awareness and critical enterprise communications. Mr. Miasnik has more than 18 years of experience in the IT sector with specific expertise in C4I (Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence) solutions and technologies. He can be reached at gmiasnik@athoc.com.
author: By Guy Miasnik