For An Audio Version of This Blog CLICK BELOW
Emergency communications within enterprise businesses are a complex yet vital consideration for ensuring the safety and well-being of employees and assets. A crucial decision IT Administrators face is whether to integrate this functionality as an inherent application within their MLTS PBX systems or utilize popular cloud-based services and solutions that have significantly matured for emergency communications. The answer to this question is often complex and depends on the size of the business and the business’s specific needs and use cases.
Small Businesses: Hosted Routing / Local Notification Solutions
Hosted VoIP systems have become popular for small office environments due to their low cost and ease of deployment. In these systems, the emergency communications capabilities can be contained virtually within the PBX system or the cloud instance in which it resides. This is especially true for small businesses with fewer than 15 devices in a single physical location. Given the modest size and building complexity, a precise location of devices is generally less critical because the entire premise is visible and easily searchable in a reasonable amount of time. Affordable built-in technology is often sufficient for notification to on-site personnel and displaying emergency location information on a monitor in a common area for first responders is supported. This provides a reasonable expectation that on-site personnel can assist in granting access, and when local staff is not present, a simple and inexpensive display provides additional information and guidance.
However, this basic response profile may change should the business operate in a more complex multi-story or multi-building campus environment. In these environments, knowing the precise location of the device placing the emergency call becomes essential. These scenarios highlight the need for another, more specific, approach involving localized on-site appliances to provide precise location data to establish compliance.
Medium-Sized Enterprises: On-Prem / Cloud Hybrid Approach
Medium-sized enterprises often supply telephony services to hundreds of users and may occupy multiple floors and buildings in campus environments. These introduce even more complexities for 911 compliance, like routing to multiple agencies depending on the location of the emergency and adding in building IoT device integration for a more detailed operational picture. Additionally, these environments often include a dynamic mobile workforce, that can benefit from a hybrid solution.
Inside the campus, on-premises device location discovery services utilize network forensics to identify a device’s precise location. The local service prevents having to send data upstream for offsite processing. Location is established and delivered quickly and accurately without requiring or impacting WAN traffic. Meanwhile, cloud-based services correlate and consolidate emergency data, provide connections to cloud-based 911 carriers for diverse routing, and deliver emergency dashboards to both local response teams as well as public safety first responders, permitting a more coordinated and efficient response.
The Large Enterprise: Cloud-Based Solutions
Cloud-based emergency communications solutions are often the most efficient for large enterprises with numerous remote workers. When users are external to the corporate environment, the primary focus is ensuring the appropriate routing of 911 calls to the nearest local public safety answering point (PSAP) to the user.
The #1 mistake made by IT Administrators is being lulled into a false sense of security of an MLTS’ rudimentary built-in functionality. While sufficient for smaller deployments, these solutions do not have the critical capabilities suitable for larger, more complex environments.
Cloud-based solutions excel in this scenario by facilitating a national umbrella routing capability for all users. Where required, on-site appliances can provide precise location discovery when users are on-premises. However, the core emergency communications infrastructure can reside in the cloud. This approach ensures scalability, flexibility, and the ability to adapt to workforce geographic distribution changes.
The Role of NG911
Next-generation 911 (NG911) capabilities are becoming increasingly relevant today, and offer advanced capabilities like improved and more precise location accuracy, the inclusion of multimedia data for greater situational awareness, and even Geofencing capabilities to provide awareness of calls to 911 placed from any cellular devices located on your property. For this reason, enterprises should prioritize deploying solutions that are capable of supporting NG911 interoperability to future-proof emergency communications systems.
As legacy E9-1-1 networks and solutions rapidly become obsolete, enterprise environments that fail to adopt NG911 services will be seriously disadvantaged. Fortunately, cloud-based NG911 carriers exist that provide protocol remediation. This allows an enterprise to transition to NG911 now, and rely on the carrier to provide compatibility with local PSAPs that are either E911 or NG911 compliant. This also removes the task of tracking local PSAP capabilities and reconfiguring the enterprise network to remain in sync with the PSAP as they evolve.
The Right Network Provider
Ultimately, deciding between on-premises, cloud-based, or hybrid emergency communications solutions depends on the enterprise’s needs. One fact that is certain is that whatever solution is deployed, it should be fully capable of delivering NG911 services and capabilities today, integrating with an NG911-compliant carrier network. Anything less will prolong the inevitable upgrade, wasting valuable resources and budget in a quickly vanishing E911 architecture that is quickly approaching End-of-Life.
Today, a fully compliant NG911 architecture provides forward compatibility, allowing enterprises to stay ahead of the technology curve and future regulatory requirements.
What to Look for in a Solution
Specific capabilities to look for in an NG911-compliant platform include:
- Support for PIDF-LO Data formats
- Ability to be in or alongside the call flow
- Integration to an NG911-compliant 911 Carrier
- Modular CPE/Cloud/Hosted architecture
- Industry participation and Thought-Leadership
Without these capabilities, future sustainability should be seriously questioned.
911inform Making Every Second Count When it Matters Most™
At 911inform, we are beyond proud of our innovative and award-winning emergency response platform – built from the ground up, and specifically for NG911. Our in-house team of dedicated, US-based developers and programmers are hard at work developing new features and capabilities. We’re proud to continue setting the gold-standard with our comprehensive set of capabilities in a solution that is not only easy to deploy, but simple to maintain.
For details on designing and implementing an advanced NG911 emergency communications solution tailored to your specific environment or one that can reduce existing costs by replacing your aging E911 solution, visit 911inform.com or call our experts at 833-333-1911. We’ll be happy to you with customized information on complying with Kari’s Law, Ray Baum’s Act, and Alyssa’s Law.
Follow me on Twitter/X @Fletch911
See my profiles on LinkedIN and Facebook
Check out my Blogs on: Fletch.TV
The World According to Fletch . . . 