App ecosystems
Although every country
and vertical has their own
rules and special requirements,
they are often very similar
to other countries’
Airbus are meticulously checked and the
Dabat device will not allow the user to
install any app that isn’t Airbus-certified.
Aronsson notes that sandboxing
features are available on some
smartphone platforms – “for example,
on Android a lot of people are doing
hardening on the Android for this
kind of use-case – which can be used
to restrict the amount and types of
information that apps can access. In
combination with other approaches to
hardening, in a hardened smartphone
environment, this means that you can
reasonably freely install apps from
the open app stores, probably not
totally openly, but it’s a way to manage
that situation.”
Aronsson adds that many
smartphones, especially those designed
for mission-critical use, can set different
security levels for different apps or can
be run in a highly secure mode which
might disable some of the apps. “So,
it’s a combination of curating the
open app stores and then at a technical
level hardening the smartphone
platforms and keeping each app in its
own sandbox.”
The race is long
Zaknoun highlights the slow speed
of internal decision-making and
procurement processes in the public
sector and large organisations. This is
far from ideal from an app developer’s
point of view as many are used to being
able to quickly bring apps to market in
the consumer world, and as many are
small or medium-sized enterprises or
start-ups, cashflow is a significant issue.
“App developers have to be patient,”
says Zaknoun. “It’s a marathon, not
a sprint.” He adds that this market
also requires a far more involved
and ongoing relationship between
developers and their customers than in
the consumer world, given the need,
in most cases, to integrate applications’
backends with customers’ databases and
authentication systems, and to adjust
apps so that they can “bring real value
to customers’ existing investments”.
He adds that one other complication
is that typically app deployment
involves working with a different set of
people on the customer side – IT teams
and departments as opposed to the
people within end-user organisations
that are responsible for TETRA and
Tetrapol networks.
Zaknoun says that if the critical
communications sector is to succeed in
attracting and retaining app developers
from outside the sector, then vendors,
network operators and end-user
organisations all need to work together
to create the market conditions in
which they can thrive. “If we don’t work
together, those developers will enter the
market and then disappear. We need
to show innovative developers that
there is a business opportunity for them
and that these three parties are here to
help them to develop and innovate for
this sector.”
Ask for more
Both Aronsson and Zaknoun say nontechnical
issues are far more significant
than technical ones, when it comes to
mission-critical app adoption. “On the
technical side, the answers are clearer
and there are experts, vendors and
others who already have solutions for
technical issues,” adds Aronsson.
“By their nature, developers are
problem-solvers – they can build
whatever you want, be it high levels
of security and availability, georedundancy
or local redundancy,” says
Zaknoun, before adding that he is
aware of developers that are building
products with the long-life cycles
preferred by mission-critical customers.
He adds that he has been surprised by
what app developers “can do in a very
short time frame – in about six to
12 months”.
Aronsson says currently the missioncritical
community is reaching out
to commercial developers and asking
for mission-critical equivalents of
popular apps such as WhatsApp, for
example, but this approach fails to take
advantage of the fact that there is a lot
of additional functionality that can be
introduced that wouldn’t be appropriate
in a consumer context. “A good
example of this is location information.
Due to privacy concerns you cannot
have consumer apps that rely on the
non-anonymised locations of lots
of people, but in the mission-critical
sector it’s typically completely okay
because it’s a job safety issue. People are
not reaching far enough if they say ‘I
want a mission-critical WhatsApp’ – it’s
better to say ‘I want a mission-critical
WhatsApp and as we can track all our
users’ locations, I want to be able to see
where the messages are being sent from
along with similar information’.”
He says app developers looking to
target the critical communications
sector should research the special
requirements around security, data
protection and reliability, both in their
own country and abroad – “especially
now that we are moving to broadband,
it’s going to become more of an
international global market than it
has been in the past. The good news
here is that although every country and
vertical has their own rules and special
requirements, they are often very similar
to those in other countries.”
We have seen that a more datacentric
approach to operations results in
impressive improvements in efficiency,
accuracy and situational awareness at
the control room operator level, but
the degree to which this is employed
varies wildly, with organisational
resistance to change being a key issue.
This can be partially alleviated through
the use of a bottom-up strategy using
small pilots to quickly demonstrate the
value of apps and similar tools. At the
same time, efforts to capitalise on the
application development skills and new
technologies being honed by the wider
telecoms sector will founder unless endusers,
network operators and vendors
come together to help app developers
through what is often a long and
involved journey to product maturity
and deployment.
Adobe Stock/deepagopi2011
20 www.criticalcomms.com September 2019
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