GSN January 2016 Digital Edition

No silver lining in cloud-based mass
notification solutions, says
Desktop Alert CEO Howard Ryan
By Steve Bittenbender
When it comes to setting up an
emergency mass notification system,
some people may use clouded
judgment.
If the system used to notify affected
personnel of an emergency –
such as an active shooter
in the vicinity – is entirely
cloud based, then
emergency managers run
the very real risk of having
the message delayed,
or even worse; never delivered
by an overtaxed
system that may have too
many demands placed
upon it to deliver an urgent
message to thousands of people
in a timely manner. That’s according
to Howard Ryan, the CEO and
founder of Desktop Alert, a mass
notification system that can be implemented
within an organization’s
existing network infrastructure.
That became evident in 2014, he
said, when a shooting took place
at Fort Hood. Desktop Alert which
was deployed on site, notified over
30,000 people about the event and
Howard Ryan, CEO and
founder, Desktop Alert
got the message out before a separate
cloud-based system notified approximately
10,000 members.
When lives are at stake every second
counts, Ryan said. According
to the Federal Bureau of Investigations,
60 percent of active shooter
incidents end before police arrived.
More than a third of
were over in two minutes
or less. Even when law
enforcement was present
or able to respond within
minutes, civilians often
had to make life and
death decisions and must
be engaged with timely
and accurate life-saving
information.
Mass notification isn’t just a job
for Ryan. It’s a passion for him, and
it shows as he talks about how product
helps the military and other clients
send urgent messages quickly.
His voice commands attention as he
speaks from authority. Ryan started
Desktop Alert 14 years ago, but he’s
been involved in programming for
about 25 years.
The cloud does have some benefits,
Ryan said. In particular, the cloud is
useful when you need overall situational
awareness of what’s happening
at numerous sites simultaneously.
But while the cloud is creating a
lot of buzz for uses in government
and commercial sectors it’s not the
cure-all for everything, Ryan said.
Let’s say you have several geographically
separated facilities. If
you need to centrally push an alert
to all those sites, each of which may
have thousands of users, through
the cloud, then you run the risk of
having the message being delayed.
Ryan, who before turning his attention
to computer programing
and network architecture became
the youngest person in New York
to receive his master plumber license,
compared using the cloud in
that manner to a building’s plumbing
system. As people turn on more
faucets – place more demands on
finite resources - , it takes each of
those faucets longer to provide the
amount desired.
Another critical problem with using
the cloud, extending the plumbing
metaphor, is what Ryan called
friction loss – similar to what happens
with water as it has to navigate
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