As I dig into the cloud space various thoughts come to me. What about the marrying of Public Safety networks for dealing with emergency calls and clouds? We know that clouds are not infallible but what if your life depended on a cloud?

This is something that those looking at the transition of the public safety networks from TDM to IP need to consider. The benefits with the change are huge, with the ability to have better connectivity and extended data types, including video.  But behind it all we expect someone to pick up the phone, and in the Public Safety parlance this is someone in a PSAP or Public Safety Answering Point.  These are similar to contact centres which need conferencing and IVR capabilities. 

The question is, does this contact centre or part of it reside in a public or private cloud? It’s technically capable of residing in a cloud and this offers many benefits. The scalability possibilities in times of an emergency would pay dividends and the sharing of capabilities from one region to another enables sharing of costs.  However, when you change the potential outcome of a cloud outage from “what will the impact be on my business?”  to “will it cost a life?”, things come into perspective.  Oh, it’s all possible that the necessary redundancies, failovers and security can be put into place to alleviate the concerns, but there is still a risk no matter what the architecture.

Minimizing and mitigating these risks are part of the conversations we have with our partners working in the public safety space as we support them in the delivery of the next generation public safety networks – connecting to legacy systems, supporting the delivery of location information, building out of the PSAP , conferencing capabilities and rolling out IVR systems to provide notifications to emergency personnel and the public alike.

Are you working in this space? What are your thoughts on moving to cloud environments?