Regional Warning System

Challenge

The Services are beginning to standardize on emergency alerting solutions to disseminate alerts throughout an entire Service in minutes. Increasingly, Services and joint commands are banding together regionally to create efficiencies from real estate to information technology. As regions behave more like a coordinated group, this dramatically impacts the need to disperse information to numerous multiple installations and tenant units quickly during times of emergency.

Audience

Regional operating centers

Solution

IWSAlerts is a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) solution that turns an organization’s existing IP network into a comprehensive emergency notification system. IWSAlerts integrates with other alerting channels such as PA communications, sirens, telephony and text-messaging services and provides a single, unified console for managing, triggering and controlling the emergency notification process across all delivery devices.

This allows organization safety managers to quickly and efficiently communicate a consistent yet individually tailored alert to personnel, first responders, senior management, security managers and surrounding communities. The information is sent via multiple and redundant means, including desktops and laptops, cell phones, PDA’s, BlackBerries, landline phones, PA systems and sirens.

Alerts can be activated in seconds, reaching thousands of people on the network in an average of one minute. And because the network uses multi-directional communication, acknowledgements from every alerted recipient can also be tracked in order to provide an instantaneous picture of personnel status and accountability.

AtHoc provides an emergency alerting solution that can meet the needs of very large, distributed organizations and allow command centers to disseminate information simultaneously to:

• Multiple installations
• Multiple tenant organizations
• Multiple commands

Military organizations can reap numerous additional benefits, including:

• Easy Installation: The software can be installed centrally and then be accessed and managed via the Web by all personnel with appropriate authorization.
• Shared Costs: Because one alerting solution can be used by multiple installations and Commands, the cost can be shared among multiple groups.
• Simplified Maintenance: AtHoc IWSAlerts can be maintained centrally, meaning that each organization using the alerting system only needs to input information without having to maintain the IT infrastructure aspects of the system.

AtHoc is making emergency alerting more effective and cost efficient than ever before. And with the addition of AtHoc’s sophisticated management capabilities, regional operation centers can manage all of their forms of alerting – network, telephony and public address – all through an easy-to-use, Web-based console. Alerts can go out through all channels simultaneously with the click of a mouse.

Solution Benefits and Capabilities

• Provides rapid mass notification using existing IP network
• Notifies personnel through multiple channels (PCs, cell phones, PDAs, pagers, BlackBerries, computer kiosks, landline phones, sirens, PA systems and digital billboards)
• Consolidates IP and traditional notification channels into a single alerting platform
• Sends intrusive audio - visual desktop alerts to recipients
• Sends alerts to other organizations such as emergency services and neighboring facilities
• Section 508 compliant - Provides alerting for special needs community
• Tracks recipient feedback in real-time
• Establishes standard operating procedures for emergency notifications
• Manages alert recipient information and integrates with user directories
• Integrates with sources of emergency information such as the National Weather Service
• Allows operators to trigger alerts from any Web browser using secure login credentials