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    • Towards the next generation control room

      Published Sep 28 2021, 7:27 AM by Clare McFarlane

      Cloud technology is encouraging police and emergency services to rethink decades-old ideas about the physically centralised control room, says Fergus Mayne, UK Country Manager and Head of Sales, Motorola Solutions.

      For decades we’ve associated the notion of a ‘control room’ with the physical aggregation of call handling resources, people and associated systems at a fixed location. This idea was tested by last year’s pandemic, when the need for social distancing saw police, fire & rescue and ambulance services explore how practices could be adapted to accommodate reduced on-site staffing levels. At the same time, many public sector organisations are flexing to accommodate a shift toward home and remote working that’s rapidly becoming the new normal for millions of employees.

      Even five years ago, taking mission-critical communication workflows outside the confines of a physical control room would have been technically infeasible. Today we’re some way from seeing frontline emergency call handling and dispatch performed by staff working out of a home office or spare bedroom. Nonetheless blue and amber light services are exploring the benefits of hosting their mission-critical control room applications securely in the cloud rather than on-premises. Enabling more agile operations, decentralising the control room allows personnel to access resources from virtually any location – whether it’s a backup site or an ad hoc incident room established in proximity to the scene of a major incident. Just as significantly, cloudification of the control room unlocks opportunities for collaboration and resource sharing within and between agencies. For example, services dealing with a major incident can draw on additional call handling capacity provided by a partner agency located in a neighbouring region or anywhere in the country.

      Come and hear more at BAPCO 2021 where Motorola Solutions' Mark Swift will be hosting the session 'Unchaining the Control Room through the Cloud to provide operational resilience and flexibility' alongside Dave Smith and David Dawe from Bedfordshire Fire & Rescue Service.

      If you've not yet registered for BAPCO you can do so here.

       

      Fergus Mayne
      Country Manager and Head of Sales 
      UK & Ireland
      Motorola Solutions
      Connect with Fergus on LinkedIn

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