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A new initiative that is linking and syncing utility and state emergency operation centers to coordinate their disaster response efforts, enhance critical infrastructure resilience, and reduce overall risks |
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THE PROBLEM
Regional multi-state disasters and crises accelerate the need for reliable, timely and actionable information in both industry and government. Decision makers rely on this information for their situational awareness and decision making. Synchronizing operational information flow between states and utilities at the regional level on specific issues like transportation closures, infrastructure damage assessments and supply chain resource status are fundamental to enhancing crisis response and critical infrastructure resilience. |
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THE SOLUTION
As part of its long-term commitment to the operationalizing of FEMA/DHS ESF#14 policy , the All Hazards Consortium’s (AHC) leadership and its private sector partners began working with multiple states on the East Coast to develop a secure “operational information" sharing framework to synchronize regional information sharing during hurricanes and winter storms.
The private sector developed the SISE (Sensitive Information Sharing Environment) to provide a trust framework for operational information sharing. The SISE, operated by the private sector, provides the legal, policy, process, and technical components need to protect sensitive information from non-operational use (e.g. media, FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests, competitors, etc...). The SISE provides the individual user vetting and verification and the data handling and labeling standards required by the data providers to ensure they know who is looking at their data, for what purpose and for how long.
Using the SISE as a safe and private information exchange, industry partitions their information into use cases or modules that are limited only to the SISE users approved for each use case by the data owners.
During a crisis, the SISE serves up a broad spectrum of operational information that is seen by operations center personnel in state/local government and industry to help sync their situational awareness and decision making on specific topics.
In 2019, industry launched a new initiative to expand the use of the SISE with state EOC's (Emergency Operations Centers) and industry for the upcoming 2021 hurricane season.
Referred to as SISE-net, this initiative leverages the SISE, to create a trusted, private sector operated, secure network to act as an information hub that serves as a vetted data repository for industry and government to use within their respective decision support systems.
SISE-net connects emergency operations centers in states and industry and synchronizes specific information like live weather, live transportation, road closures, emergency resource providers, threats, declarations and waivers, state/industry points of contacts, etc…
The Results
The result of SISE-net is to provide decision makers with the most reliable, synchronized data sources so that all stakeholders are looking at the same data at the same instant and support more confident decision making…faster.
Additionally, SISE-net provides a sustained planning and exercise framework that brings states and industry together to discuss and test plans, conduct exercises to identify gaps and understand processes, solve operational problems together.
Along with providing the synchronization of information during a crisis, the SISE-net initiative builds trust among the SISE stakeholders which increases information sharing and promotes cross-sector innovation to address operational problems they all face together.
People trusting each other and working together to solve problems is the ultimate outcome of the SISE-net initiative.
The result of SISE-net is to provide decision makers with the most reliable, synchronized data sources so that all stakeholders are looking at the same data at the same instant and support more confident decision making…faster.
Additionally, SISE-net provides a sustained planning and exercise framework that brings states and industry together to discuss and test plans, conduct exercises to identify gaps and understand processes, solve operational problems together.
Along with providing the synchronization of information during a crisis, the SISE-net initiative builds trust among the SISE stakeholders which increases information sharing and promotes cross-sector innovation to address operational problems they all face together.
People trusting each other and working together to solve problems is the ultimate outcome of the SISE-net initiative.