Using emergency alerting systems to protect the U.S. critical infrastructure // by Simon Berman

facilities the ability to communicate emergency information rapidly to personnel and first responders. This technology is so effective that DoD has created best practices for emergency alerting, some of which have become official regulations and instructions for the U.S. military services.

DoD has been using numerous forms of alerting for years. In the past decade, the most prevalent forms were stand-alone public address systems, sirens, and more recently, e-mail and telephony alerting. The past five years, however, have seen a fundamental paradigm shift in emergency alerting. IP network-based alerting has emerged as the preferred approach for mass notification to personnel. It provides unprecedented reach and speed - reaching hundreds of thousands of people in minutes, regardless of their location. It also provides an integrated framework for managing all communication channels from a single application.

Unlike public address systems, which are limited geographically, and telephony alerting systems which have scalability and speed issues, the IP network offers a powerful channel for rapidly reaching large, geographically dispersed groups. Any computer or mobile device connected to the network can receive detailed alerts that include recipient-specific instructions for action as well as provide a feedback mechanism to inform the organization about the status of the recipients.

With an open, IP-based architecture, such systems can also integrate with the existing communication channels and delivery devices to create a unified system capable of managing and triggering all channels within a single alert. The network-centric solution can trigger alerts to all network-connected devices while also triggering public address and telephony systems. This provides a significantly faster delivery time with more consistent messages.

Emergency operations centers can predefine potential scenarios and decide who should be doing what in response to the situation. If the scenario materializes, thousands of people can be alerted with a single keystroke, each receiving detailed instructions in the form of intrusive audio-visual pop-up windows on the desktop, text-to-speech messages through a telephone call, text messages on a PDA, as well as audio messages over the public address system. The alerts describe what actions to take, where people should go, and in cases in which personalized delivery devices are used, provide more detailed information such as maps or evacuation routes.

As an added benefit of a network-centric approach to emergency notification, DoD achieves higher alerting success rates due to channel redundancy. A single alert can be sent through all channels simultaneously, dramatically increasing the chances that everyone targeted by the