Helping Monitoring Stations Stay Operational
Helping Alarm Monitoring Stations – Alarm monitoring centers continue to seek remote working tools to keep their employees safe and connected during the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. To support the industry, DICE Corporation has been stepping up to ensure customers are equipped with the technology necessary to operate their monitoring centers as if they were in the office.
Security Systems News recently featured DICE Corporation in an article on keeping central stations operational during a pandemic. Our president and CEO Cliff Dice and executive vice president Avi Lupo discussed the state of the industry and their business continuity needs and what DICE is doing to ensure underrepresented small to medium-size monitoring centers are getting the tools they need to work safely and efficiently.
“Looking big picture, there are tens of millions of accounts connected to these monitoring stations today,” Lupo told Security Systems News. “For a company that has anywhere from 20 to 200 operators and other operations people in a building, if you are not ready to do things remotely, you can expose yourself with one event such as this.”
Dice noted that the nature of this crisis is different from what the industry has dealt with before. “This is a little different because you can’t have all of your people at the office, but all of your equipment and computers are still running, and your signals are still coming into your receivers, but you just don’t have people there to run anything. It’s almost like an evacuation.”
At least 50 companies have switched over to remote operations using DICE’s services as of early April. “We continue to switch more each week,” Dice said. “Some of these are big – with 100,000 to 200,000 accounts – sending all of their operators home. So you are looking at 30-40 operators on a shift, and they all have to be on the same automation package, which is what we specialize in. What we excel in is that we are the IT team for smaller to mid-size companies that can’t do this on their own, so we are helping them do that with our infrastructure and technology.”
Lupo and Dice also clarified that business continuity and disaster recovery services are not limited to DICE customers. The company is working with anyone to provide infrastructure and automation technology to get them running remotely.
Please read the full article here and learn how a virtual switch in the cloud allows DICE to route operators’ phone numbers to personal smartphones and softphones in their homes.