Ready For Any Situation

• By Ralph C. Jensen
• May 06, 2009

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. -- When the time to perform is at hand, business continuity planners likely have already taken proactive measures to make sure that everything needed is in place. Situational readiness is a valuable tool which brings the public and private sector the ability to improve awareness of man-made and natural calamities.

Situational awareness is a keen solution that provides alerts and warming about events or incidents in an area near a subscriber’s business or an area of interest. Incident response could include such warnings as chemical spills, fires, transportation events or bombs.

“Our situational awareness and secure communication and collaboration solutions are services able to be accessed via the Internet,” said Jim Montagnino, CEO and president of NC4. “Our typical users are corporate security, business continuity and emergency management professionals.”

NC4 and the El Segundo, Calif., incident monitoring center were part of security trade publication editor’s tour recently sponsored by ASIS.

Company officials from NC4 were pleased to show off its West Coast center, where analysts provide real-time, proactive incident information. The data is personalized while geo-relevant alerts are sent to customers in the United States, as well as 80 countries worldwide. Alerts are prioritized, coded and categorized by type and severity of incident.

NC4 is often able to pass along information before it becomes available from the media, alerting their clients quicker.

“We provide customers with a higher level of preparedness by providing focused, relevant incident alerts,” Montagnino said. “We can do this by leveraging thousands of diverse information sources to provide early warning of incidents.”

The company uses proprietary technology that continually scans information sources, filtering thousands of incidents each day by analysts. Research also puts a value on data that would have a direct business impact, which among other incidents would include severe hazardous materials situations, tanker truck accidents, interstate highway closures and suspicious packages.

Among the solutions researched by NC4 include New York’s response to 9/11, Olympic events hosted in Salt Lake City and Athens, the 2004 G8 Summit, the 2005 Presidential Inauguration and numerous sporting events