Page 32 - Security Today, October 2017

Cover Story
Using the Cloud
Finding ways to improve response times
By Nicholas Maier
Today, cloud applications are all the rage and for good rea- son. The cloud allows us to work and play in ways that are so much more productive and engaging. The cloud also removes the burden of deploying and managing complex enterprise applications within the business.
Let’s look at how the cloud is revolutionizing emergency response.
The government created a nationwide emergency call system, known as the 911 system, in 1968. It provided the incentives for the existing monopoly carriers to adopt a national 911 system and as a result the technology architecture adopted in 1968 has survived in its current form to this day, although it has been modified and added to in order to support cell phone 911, VoIP and SIP.
A New Standard
The legacy architecture cannot be adapted to support the most mean- ingful enhancements to emergency response. Features like text 911, video streaming of 911 events, dynamic geo-spatial routing of 911 calls require a new architecture and that architecture, the NENA i3 standard, is where we are heading.
Several of the key elements of the NENA i3 architecture have al-
ready been put in place and are in use today to provide 911 emer- gency response. While these elements interface with legacy 911 net- works, they live in the cloud and they point the way to a fully cloud based national 911 system.
Here are a few of the elements of the NENA i3 architecture that are already deployed:
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Location aware phones. The newest phones from Polycom, Sky- pe, Broadsoft and Yealink request a location object when they reg- ister on the network. They store this location object, called PIDF- LO, and, if the phone makes a 911 call, the PIDF-LO is sent in the SIP signaling stream.
SIP trunking and SIP communications. Many enterprises have made the transition to SIP trunking, saving themselves thousands of dollars a month due to the dynamic bandwidth allocation sup- ported by SIP. The NENA i3 architecture runs on the SIP protocol and SIP communications over SIP trunks or over the Internet is commonplace.
Dynamic 911 call routing. 911 calls can now be routed by cloud- based applications to any 911 center in the USA and Canada. (over 5000 Public Safety Answering Points). The call can be rout-