Critical messaging
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www.criticalcomms.com October 2019
highways, even using feeds from traffic
cameras to confirm the flow (or lack of
it) of vehicles.
He adds: “In a severe situation, let’s
say the storm partially removes the roof
of one of your facilities, your employees
can take the mobile app and tap the
SOS button, and that’s going to start
streaming live audio and video directly
from their device, which can be
immediately seen by those monitoring
the system. From there we can provide
them with guidance” – which is
particularly important in situations
where emergency services are so busy
that they can’t respond to every call.
Of course, during events such as this
there can be a lot of worried executives
and major stakeholders, all clamouring
to be kept in the loop. “Traditionally,
you’d have people writing emails and
filling out reports in Word templates
to keep them informed; we think
it’s more important to task your
response people with saving lives and
protecting property, so we provide
some automated capabilities within the
platform to keep your stakeholders up
to date.”
In apprehension how like
a god
Mummah then switches to the live
Everbridge platform. Zooming out to
get a view of the events and incidents
that are unfolding around the world is
a somewhat giddy and awe-inspiring
experience, while at the same time
being strangely familiar to anyone who
has played strategy computer games
such as Civilization or X-COM. In our
industry, we talk a lot about situational
awareness – this is it refined and
distilled into something almost godlike.
This feeling is made all the more
acute when Mummah and Morrison
give me a feel for the vast number of
different data sources that were used to
create the graphics I’m seeing.
“We have sources that report on
events just about everywhere in the
world,” says Mummah. “Probably our
best source is ourselves; we employ a
pair of risk monitoring centres that
are monitoring risk on a global basis
that includes 13 different languages
and a variety of different capabilities to
view into social media, public media
sources, even emergency medical
services (EMS), and fire and police
dispatch systems – in certain cities, we
are plugged into those as well, so we
can monitor with a pretty high degree
of accuracy any type of event that’s
happening in the world.”
Morrison adds that Everbridge
monitors about 20,000 news sources
on a daily basis and uses machine
learning to categorise and de-duplicate
them, though human analysts also
play a role. They typically deal with
situations where the algorithms struggle
to de-duplicate an incident, when an
incident has to be narrowed down to
a more exact location or to determine
its severity. One of the key things
about the system is while customers get
the same information feeds, they can
customise how it responds to events,
particularly in terms of the severity of
the events that are flagged up and their
proximity to assets and employees. “For
example, for a tsunami you might want
a kilometre range, but for an active
assailant you might want something
much narrower,” says Morrison. While
the system doesn’t predict as such, it
does show forward-looking intelligence,
such as planned events that might have
an impact on traffic and supply routes.
From many to one
So far, we have concentrated on largescale
incidents, but what of those that
might only affect a single individual
in an organisation? Returning to my
conversation with Mouline, he says
that Everbridge has capabilities in this
regard, such as the ability to combine
employees’ travel itineraries and
critical event notifications across the
globe to address organisations’ duty
of care in such situations. There are
also the hazards that employees can
face when lone working (look out for
an article on this in November’s Land
Mobile) – Mouline uses the example of
a clerk opening up or closing down a
bank branch at the start or end of the
day and says Everbridge is addressing
this through its recently announced
partnership with RiskBand, a provider
of wearable, live-monitored professional
safety devices, which provide twoway
voice, user profile data, images
and geolocation in near real time to
organisations’ security operations
centres. These will be integrated
with Everbridge’s Safety Connection
platform, and the company is looking
to introduce additional wearables into
the marketplace, and integrate further
with IoT devices, sensors and smart
building technology as part of its work
in this area.
Mouline highlights the value of
having user profile information given
that the risks can be higher during
critical events for those who depend
on electricity, oxygen canisters or
insulin injections.
The pager vs app debate
Of course, here at Critical
Communications Today, we tend to
focus on the people who run towards
danger rather than those who should be
running away from it. To address this
balance, let’s take a look at the other
side of critical messaging – the use of
pagers and similar devices to mobilise
first-responders and medical staff.
Swissphone’s head of international
sales, Graeme Hull, says: “In recent
years, POCSAG (Post Office Code
Standardisation Advisory Group)
paging systems have been newly
tendered and some have already been
put into operation. In Germany,
three to four tenders (counties and
federal states) are published annually;
in Belgium and Holland the national
paging networks have been renewed
Zooming out to get a view of the
events and incidents unfolding
around the world is a somewhat
giddy and awe-inspiring experience
Two-way paging
is frequently used
to alert volunteer
firefighters and
to allow them to
indicate if they
can respond to
an incident
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