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Command Center prepares with its own disaster recovery center

Command Center prepares with its own disaster recovery center

CORONA, Calif.--The Command Center, a third-party monitoring business, created a disaster recovery center 45 miles from its southern California location to ensure continuous operation when disaster strikes. The disaster recovery center will roll out this quarter, after a year and one-half of preparation. It will have a separate telephone switch from a different carrier, but all other station elements will mirror its existing site with automation servers and workstations. The facility will be unmanned. However, should the current central station become unusable, "we can reroute our signals and are close enough to drive to the fully-functional location," said Morgan Hertel, central station manger. It was practical for the company to set up a disaster recovery center as natural threats and other issues that prompt evacuation can happen without notice. "All it takes is a phone call to the local police saying a bomb is in the building or an envelope filled with powder gets opened," Hertel said. Those types of threats call for time out of the building, which could be anywhere from hours to days, Hertel said. As monitoring stations monitor valuable and personal assets around the clock for customers, it is critical to have a redundancy plan to receive alarm signals. More often than not, centrals team with outside companies that provide a form of redundancy, such as DICE software and its disaster recovery centers, to which a central station can subscribe, or SIMS, which offers software redundancy, where operators can tap remotely into the central station over the Internet in case there is a need to evacuate. For more on The Command Center's disaster recovery center see the January issue of Security Systems News.

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