When Disaster Strikes, Mobile Strategies Can Help Local Governments Respond Better
Napa Fire Captain Steve Becker inspects mobile homes which were destroyed Sunday, Aug. 24, 2014, at the Napa Valley Mobile Home Park, in Napa, Calif. Ben Margot / AP Photo
And as Napa County has demonstrated, IT security doesn’t necessarily have to be sacrificed in the chaos.
When a 6.0 magnitude earthquake shook parts of Northern California early on a Sunday morning last August, Napa County government personnel soon discovered that the designated location to assemble an emergency operations center in the county administration building was unusable.
Parts of the ceiling fell in and pipes inside the building ruptured, causing extensive water damage.
County government personnel quickly regrouped and assembled a new emergency operations center at the sheriff’s department to help manage the response.
While getting a new EOC—and the IT systems needed to support it—up and running during an unfolding disaster response situation might seem daunting, it was easier than you might think thanks to the flexibility of mobile technology.
In this case, Napa County’s government works with Sunnyvale, California-based Good Technology, which specializes in secure mobility and offers a mobile management suite for the private and public sectors.
“We had to activate a handful of new users ASAP,” Gary Coverdale, the county’s assistant chief information officer and chief information security officer, said in a recent interview. “And that was easy to do. . . . You just download the app from Apple. And you key in the PIN number that we provide. It was really smooth.”
While firefighters and paramedics might first come to mind when it comes to responding to a disaster like an earthquake, a local government’s IT response, in some ways, can be of more critical importance.
That was especially true in Napa County, where the Aug. 24 earthquake ended up causing one death, more than 200 injuries and, according to initial estimates, up to $1 billion in damage.
“We have a handful of iPads not ever being used, updated and fired up and tested but not used” until a disaster response situation when they’re deployed to communicate with area hospitals, Coverdale said. “When you provide and set up these things, you’ll think, ‘Oh, we’ll never have a disaster. And of course, we had one.’”
Overall, between 400 to 500 county workers, roughly one-third of the Napa County government’s workforce, had to be relocated in the quake’s aftermath. “We had to move a lot of people around,” Coverdale said. “The mobility really helped.”
Disaster situations, unfortunately, can sometimes attract attacks from those who sense there may be security vulnerabilities to be exploited.
“In a lot of [disaster] events you drop your security posture for the sake of getting people up and running,” Coverdale said.
But it helps when somebody else is worrying about the security of your mobile assets when you have more important things to worry about, like responding to a damaging earthquake.
That’s where Good’s mobile security platforms have been an important IT asset.
“Right now the cybersecurity issues have become much more higher order in terms of what’s on the mind of government officials at every level,” Chris Roberts, Good’s vice president for public sector, said in a recent interview. “They are much more deeply concerned about making sure information is secure and that this doesn’t become a weak point or a vulnerability in the network as a whole.”
For Napa County, this extends way beyond disaster response and into its regular daily operations. More and more, county departments, which are less and less tied down to the constraints of brick-and-mortar buildings these days, are utilizing mobile technology.
That includes law enforcement personnel and county inspectors who are out in the field daily. But it also extends to other departments, such as child protective services and child welfare services.
“We do a lot of picture-taking with the iPads,” Coverdale said. “And those are highly protected pictures.”
When sensitive information is being captured, it’s usually best to err on the side of being overly cautious.
“We’re not the [National Security Agency], we’re not the Atomic Energy Commission,” Coverdale said. “It’s probably overkill. But if we lose a device, it’s a safe harbor. We know it’s protected. … We know it’s encrypted. So it’s an incident but not a breach.”
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