Disaster Planning

Keeping everyone on a school campus—whether it be a K-12 facility or a post-secondary institution of higher learning—is a task that weighs heavily on the minds of many administrators these days. Incidents in the past few years have re-focused attention on this important aspect of running any school.

 

Luckily, new developments in communications technology are making it easier and more affordable to optimize campus safety. To learn more about such technologies, TMCnet turned to Trent Waterhouse, vice president of marketing at Enterasys (News - Alert), a company that offers network security solutions for campus safety and other applications.

 

 

TW: Universities are struggling to preserve the open access to their campus by staff, employees, students and the local community—but recent incidents are driving the need to investigate more closely controlled access to get inside buildings. In the K-12 space, campuses are closed/fenced and metal detectors are present at many high schools. Many office buildings implement metal detectors and package scanning for access as well. The technology exists to better control building access, but it is a challenge from a funding and priorities perspective. As many parents send their children to college, there is a responsibility by the university and campus police to help protect their safety.

 

 

TW: The rising number of recent campus shooting incidents with national and international coverage by the media is focusing attention on campus safety. The one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech incident is approaching (April 16) raising the question about copycat incidents on other campuses. The vulnerability of a college campus to these types of incidents has always been present, but it seems lately that these vulnerabilities are being exploited with increasing frequency.

 

 

TW: K-12 environments can be more closely controlled in terms of campus and building access physical security; there is not a need to be as “open” as college campuses.

 

 

TW: There are three main challenges: priorities, funding and culture. By their very nature, higher-education campuses are designed for open access, yet there remains a need to protect the students, faculty, administration, guests, contractors and local community organizations that may be using university facilities. Deploying physical security systems of door badge access readers, security cameras, metal detectors or fencing costs money and raise privacy concerns. However, these same technologies are used when people work in an office building or have to travel on an airplane, so it is becoming more common that individuals need to subject themselves to screening, identity and access control technologies.

 

 

TW: Proactive physical and electronic security measures like door badge access readers, electronic door locks, security cameras and emergency notification systems are being deployed.

 

 

TW: Enterasys delivers what it calls “Secure Networks,” ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of IT services and the business users that rely on them without sacrificing performance. Thousands of enterprises, government agencies and educational institutions in more than 70 countries worldwide rely on Enterasys’ convergence, connectivity and compliance solutions to deliver business-oriented, policy-based visibility and control of individual user and application priority and security.

 

The Enterasys Enterprise Notification System (ENS) solution is the first on-demand alert system to reach every online user in a building or on a campus, regardless of whether they are a pre-registered student/employee or a visiting guest/contractor. Everyone connecting to the organization’s data network—managed or not—is automatically presented with on-screen emergency response instructions. The Enterasys ENS also may be used to deliver important community emergency information such as AMBER alerts and weather information targeted to a specific area. ENS assures rapid delivery of consistent message information in a cost-effective manner when it matters most.

 

 

TW: Enterasys leverages the ubiquitous access of Internet browsing to temporarily redirect anyone online to the emergency notification instructions and ask for acknowledgement that they have been read/seen. Enterasys ENS integrates and interoperates with other text-messaging, email or voicemail notification systems that may already be present to ensure that beyond the Web, e-mail, text and voice communications remain available.

 

SMS-based text messages are limited to 128 characters, and this fact led one university CIO to comment that this only provides enough space to say, “Shooter on campus – duck” before the message is truncated. The downside of e-mail, text and voicemail systems is that they require pre-registration by the student or employee, so messages never reach guests/visitors/temporary contractors. Also, it can take hours for a large voicemail or text message distribution to reach all recipients. The Web-based approach of Enterasys is immediate and requires no pre-registration. The ENS from Enterasys is a closed-loop system, unique in the market, by allowing online users to acknowledge receipt of the message while also providing a “silent alarm” notification and feedback channel to first responders.

 

 

TW: A recent situation at St. John’s University in New York (see http://www.stjohns.edu/about/news/items/pr_uni_070926c.sju) illustrated the pre-registration problem. On September 26, 2007, a gunman on campus resulted in the university community being advised via a text messaging system to stay in classrooms and remain in buildings and offices until the campus could be secured. According to university spokesman Dominic Scianna, before the incident 2,100 people had registered for emergency text messages. Now, there are 9,000. St. John’s has a total student and faculty population of more than 21,500. Less than half of the school’s community is pre-registered to receive text messaging alerts even after a major campus incident.

 

Fitchburg State College in Massachusetts sees the Enterasys ENS as another opportunity for innovation by notifying their community of students, faculty, employees and guests via every possible means. (See http://www.enterasys.com/company/press-release-item.aspx?id=699.) The ENS solution from Enterasys is a proactive investment to ensure every online user is reached with relevant information to ensure their safety. Purdue Calumet is using Enterasys ENS for weather information related to class cancellations and parking lot closures, in addition to emergency notification.

 

 

TW: Enterasys ENS is a one-time cost, not a monthly or annual recurring cost per user. By partnering with Dell (News - Alert), Enterasys can offer a variety of attractive financing options. More information about the Enterasys Enterprise Notification System can be found online at: http://www.enterasys.com/company/literature/sn-ens-sb.pdf