From the perspective of integrated planning and management of a crisis event, COVID-19 has caught a great many government agencies and Defence forces with their pants down. Their technology and systems readiness have been acutely tested, and the approaches used by many government agencies to date have largely failed. The technology and organisational responses have been haphazard and to put it in the nicest possible way, disorganised.
This is really a crying shame as the time for planning and executing responses is well before the emergency is upon us. Many agencies have simply relied on traditional IT approaches to be able to function and operate during times of crisis, and these traditional solutions have fallen well short of the mark.
For Australia and the world, this year with the multiple crisis’ we have already faced such as bushfires, floods and COVID-19 has illustrated the definite need for IT systems to be able to support a broad range of ‘anything but normal’ conditions.
For unclassified workloads, Microsoft Office 365 and especially Teams©, SharePoint© and Microsoft Outlook© represent a powerful combination to address some of the challenges of dealing with emergency situations.
For classified workloads including restricted/protected, secret and top secret, the choices are far more limited. The great news is, if you need an advanced, Command and Control support system underpinned by a modern architecture, including advanced jump to search. Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) data management capabilities, then Secure Search and Information Exchange (S2IX) is an incredibly powerful and versatile, not to mention Defence tested and accredited platform that can solve a wide range of challenges, including;
Support for collaboration and planning at all levels, from strategic to tactical.
Mission management and execution support, across all areas of operations.
Data ingestion, aggregation, analysis and visualisation.
Highly secure data exchange across classification levels and security domains
Fully integrated business process management, including automation and orchestration.
Standard and advanced search of all data holdings.
Full support for Government grade information classifications of documents and data, including releasability, classification and caveat management.
Through modern containerised and virtualised methods, S2IX can support your mission, operation or inter-agency collaboration, both in an operational headquarters and also in theatre. Its unique architecture and approach to challenging networks (S2IX operates over any network, regardless of how good or bad the connection) allows S2IX to continue processing, on a ship, in a vehicle or in a data centre.
With their latest partner Blackned, S2IX can now also provide instant messaging and chat, click to voice and click to video on modern smartphones, automatically bridging your information back into S2IX platform to integrate all your data across the area of operation. We can harmonise any existing waveform you have and leverage that in a crypto-safe manner.
S2IX is available in cloud through the Azure marketplace and can be deployed in the Australian Central Data Center which is classified for up to protected for instances where government agencies require higher levels of data and information classification. S2IX is available in deployable cloud formats, including Azure Stack and Azure Databox Edge. For higher level classifications, S2IX functions on all modern hypervisors allowing deployments for secret and top-secret environments.
To learn more about how S2IX can help government and defence bodies during times of crisis and pandemics, click here.
For more information, feel free to contact us or visit the S2IX website. We can arrange a full demonstration of managing an epidemic leveraging S2IX platform. This can be done remotely as an online session.