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Situation
Like all Army posts, Fort Riley is required to maintain a constant level of preparedness to react to expected – and unexpected – events. This installation takes this responsibility seriously, and in 2005, the Fort Riley Operations Center (FROC) determined the Fort needed a reliable and secure method for delivering emergency threat notifications to its 3,000 personnel in cases of emergency. These notifications can range from Force Protection Conditions (FPCONs) and antiterrorism warnings, to natural disaster alerts.
According to Steven Seals from Fort Riley’s Directorate of Information Management (DOIM), “Force protection is a top priority and Fort Riley takes emergency preparedness very seriously. While our most common threats are tornadoes, we must be ready to respond to any threat. We needed a network-centric alerting solution so we could quickly alert all personnel connected to the network.”
Fort Riley required a network alerting solution to complement the base’s existing public address and telephony alerting systems. The solution would ensure anyone connected to the network would be notified of the situation as soon as possible. The selected system needed to include provisions for secure communication, authentication and encryption using DoD and industry-standard PKI-encryption technologies.
Solution Delivered
Fort Riley turned to AtHoc to meet its emergency alerting needs. AtHoc IWSAlerts™ is now implemented at the Fort and enables alerts to be sent to all computers at Fort Riley when threats are identified. The alerts can be sent to all computers in an average of one minute from the FROC’s launching the alert.
The alerts, in the form of pop-up windows accompanied by an audio alarm, describe the threat, categorize the threat level and include instructions for taking appropriate action. When a user clicks on the pop-up window, the system’s main server acknowledges and tracks the receipt.
AtHoc-generated alerts comply with signals and messaging specifications appropriate to FPCONs, weather warnings, evacuation routes, battle staff directives and other federal, Department of Defense (DoD) and Army-specific emergency notifications. AtHoc IWSAlerts also includes a library of pre-programmed audio-visual signals to correspond to these scenarios.
In addition to being able to send alerts to the entire Fort Riley staff, the FROC uses AtHoc IWSAlerts to send highly-targeted messages to specific groups of people on base to respond to specific scenarios. Targeted alerts can be sent to military police, emergency management services, crisis management teams, fire services or other groups depending on the situation. The FROC can select from preprogrammed scenarios which they can tailor for each circumstance.
To activate alerts, FROC operators use IWSAlerts’ Web-based operator console. Using this console, operators can activate alerts from any computer connected to the base’s network using the correct username and password – a crucial capability especially if the primary FROC gets disabled during an emergency. The system can also be configured so that each operator has different rights to activate specific types of alerts. For example, some operators may be limited to activating weather alerts while others can only launch IT alerts.
AtHoc IWSAlerts is an enterprise-class, commercial-off-the-shelf software running on a Microsoft platform. AtHoc IWSAlerts has received Defense Information Technology Security Certification and Accreditation Process (DITSCAP) certification.
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Conclusion |
Fort Riley now uses AtHoc IWSAlerts daily to contact their staff about threats ranging from a fire alarm to an unauthorized person trying to get onto the Fort. The AtHoc product has also proven very valuable in informing Fort personnel about inclement weather conditions.
Using AtHoc IWSAlerts – a network-centric, highly-secure and scalable solution for emergency notifications – Fort Riley is dramatically improving base emergency response readiness. While the system is most often being used for day-to-day emergencies, this DoD installation must be prepared to respond to the worst scenarios within minutes. Fort Riley is ready.
By selecting AtHoc IWSAlerts and leveraging its existing network infrastructure – one of the Fort’s most pervasive assets – Fort Riley has significantly increased the likelihood all personnel will be prepared for emergencies while keeping total cost and time of deployment to a minimum. |
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