LONG BEACH, CA--(Marketwire - February 19, 2008) - From Campus Safety Conference - Cisco®
(
NASDAQ:
CSCO) today reported a change in how K-12 schools, colleges and
universities view emergency preparedness and security management when
designing their campus safety architectures. Seizing a movement already
under way in businesses and government agencies, school officials
increasingly recognize the importance of converging their physical security
tools on their networks and are doing so at an unprecedented pace.
Campus security has long been a top priority for schools from kindergarten
to higher education. At many schools, however, the physical and network
security infrastructures are disjointed, comprising a patchwork of separate
alarm systems, surveillance cameras, communication systems and radios that
cannot interact with the digital, network-connected systems more recently
put in place.
But recent national events have revealed the need to improve emergency
management planning and systems. Increasingly, Cisco is finding that
schools recognize that physical and network security systems should not
operate independent of one another. Likewise, pending legislation in the
U.S. Congress as well as in state legislatures spotlights the need for
schools to update their infrastructures to better coordinate with first
responders.
Cisco is helping these schools set up their physical and information
technology (IT) systems to achieve the holistic, modern infrastructures
necessary to meet campus safety challenges and comply with legislative
pressures to modernize their security systems.
Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah, sought to model its campus
safety systems on those in the corporate world by converging IT with
physical security tools. All of BYU's major campus buildings now use
physical access cards connected to the network, and the university recently
converged analog surveillance cameras as well as its campus radio system
with Cisco IP Interoperability Collaboration System (IPICS) and its
IP-based network.
"Before we modernized our campus safety communications, training used to be
a nightmare for our emergency dispatchers because they literally had to
know more than 70 different user interfaces to transmit information," said
Steve Goodman, BYU's communications center supervisor. "Now that we're
using the network as our communication platform, the dispatch process is
streamlined and efficient."
At Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., Director for Networks and Systems
John Turner realized that it needed a major reevaluation of its campus
emergency notification tools. He knew that his investment in Cisco Unified
Communications could help bridge some gaps. The first move was to roll out
Berbee Informacast, which enables users to broadcast messages to overhead
speakers and to displays on Cisco Unified IP Phones across campus.
"We wanted to ensure we used all the tools we had available to us in the
most effective way possible; our IP-based communication system allowed us
the flexibility to expand our communications reach," Turner said.
Moraine Valley Community College in Palos Hills, Ill., also made IP
communications central to its campus safety and communication strategy.
College officials deployed SchoolMessenger for Cisco Unified
Communications, which supports onsite day-to-day operations and is
integrated with an IP communications platform. In addition, they use
SchoolMessenger's Application Service Provider (ASP) solution for
additional offsite capacity. This solution is saving the school more than
$300,000 over a three-year period compared to traditional security
approaches.
"By using SchoolMessenger it took us just 16 minutes to alert 18,000
students that the school would be closed due to bad weather," said Jack
Leifel, Moraine Valley Community College's chief information officer. "Our
system then automated a report of who answered the phone, who received
voice messages, and which calls did not go through."
Grant Joint Union High School District in Sacramento, Calif., won a grant
under the U.S. Department of Justice's Securing Our Schools program to
install an IP-based video surveillance system on school grounds. By
utilizing Cisco's Video Surveillance Manager they are able to allow each
school's administration staff and the Grant Police to easily view live and
recorded video, as well as to search and transmit images from local and
remote locations. As with Brigham Young, Brandeis and Moraine Valley, Cisco
worked closely with the school to converge physical security tools with the
network.
"The video IP cameras immediately changed our outlook on campus security,
and we realized the extent to which we could communicate with faculty,
police and students needed to be shared at the district level," said Joni
Jones, senior network engineer at Grant Joint Union. "Now, across our
district, authorized personnel are able to access and manage live and
recorded video from virtually anywhere."
At the Campus Safety Conference in Long Beach, Calif., Cisco's Phylis
Miquel, global education solutions manager, and Dean Zanone, public safety
account manager and retired sergeant in the Seal Beach Police Department,
will discuss the convergence trend at length and make recommendations for
how IT can provide more value with services to overcome the limitations of
physical safety systems.
"Campus and law enforcement officials understand that physical and network
security tools must converge in order to provide the safest environment for
students," said Miquel. "In a converged world, security surveillance
footage can be relayed instantly to the relevant authorities allowing them
to respond to threats as or before they happen, not hours later."
CISCO SESSION AT CAMPUS SAFETY CONFERENCE:
Long Beach Convention Center
3-5 p.m.
Wednesday, February 20
http://www.campussafetyconference.com/Program/Sessions/
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