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In-house emergency notification system |
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Hosted emergency notification service |
Costs |
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Cost for a local system includes
an upfront cost and annual costs for equipment, communication lines and
maintenance. By comparison, the cost of using the system is often small
and in many cases insignificant. |
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Users forgo the cost of installing
additional phone lines but incur increased costs for individual phone
calls. Pricing and even pricing strategies differ among different
vendors, depending on capacity desired, the volume of calls, and service
level desired. Not always cheaper than a System. |
Data protection, security and privacy |
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Local Systems can be more thoroughly
secured if the organization exercises usual or unusual caution. Some
local system vendors will require that they have access to your system
for maintenance purposes, others can support and maintain applications
without ever having to penetrate your security perimeter |
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Since hosted solutions are accessed over
the web, these websites can become subject to direct attacks by
malicious persons, or can be inadvertently subject to viruses and
exploits aimed more generally at the WEB environments used by the
Service Providers. Perhaps of more concern, employees of service
providers have access to company information. |
Performance |
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Local systems are limited in performance by
the capacity and availability of the phone lines and other communication
channels provided. This often means that the scope of
notifications attempted with a local system is smaller, and more focused
on the key groups that are needed in incidents |
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Service solutions encourage users to think
of expanding the scope of notifications to larger groups of recipients -
potentially all employees, or all employees in a given facility - not
just those employees charged with specific responsibilities in an
emergency. It is important to recognize that there are practical
limitations in the phone network and with data that can severely
restrict an organization's ability to execute large scale notification,
regardless of the Service Level agreement. |
Using the System |
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Local Systems rely on locally installed
Client software for constructing and maintaining call outs. This,
by itself, allows an organization to restrict access to an application,
but it does mean that if access is desired when a control room is not
staffed, alternative means of remote access must be arranged.
Activation of call outs is accomplished via telephone, or via computer. |
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Since administrators do not have to go to a
control room or to computers with client software installed, any one
with authority can update information or review and modify groups from
anywhere, home or office. It is, however, more difficult to handle
recording for messages with a service, since it is difficult to
guarantee sound quality on a local machine. Activation via telephone is
usually available, though it can be more complicated than with a local
system, particularly with shared services. |
Integration |
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Local Systems have the advantage of being
close to the source information, or other local systems and controls,
and so integration can often be entirely automated, and updates function
very frequently without interruption. Local systems are also
better able to support local alerting devices such as Equipment Sensing
devices, fire alarm panels, or older notification systems like dial up
pagers. |
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Service solutions are at a disadvantage
when it comes to integration with local data sources, and very often
updating process involve some manual procedures. They are also
restricted in the types of hardware they can interface with, both in
terms of paging systems, and other hardware like Sensing devices in a
chemical plant, or fire alarm panels. |