November 16, 2010–
The Haiti earthquake, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill had one thing in common – the Coast Guard used the Alert and Warning System (AWS) 2.0 to issue a tsunami warning and information regarding waterway closures for both. The Defense Systems article “Coast Guard’s two-way alert system keeps partners informed,” illustrates the advantage and usefulness of this new system over the previous version, stating:
AWS 2.0 is based on AtHoc’s IWSAlerts Web-based alerting system…it allows the Coast Guard to run a single instance of the software at the data center while captains or other authorized personnel can access the system and issue alerts from any Coast Guard workstations.
The new network-centric system boasts two distinguishing features: a cloud-based setup that eliminates the need to manage multiple servers and a bidirectional system that can embed an option facilitating the end-user to reply. AWS 2.0 also unifies multiple systems to trigger all the alerts and notifications from one centralized console. No doubt, this web-based warning bypasses any searches, delivering the critical information rapidly and directly to where it matters. We are witnessing a revolution in emergency mass notification systems.
Harleena Singh
