Regional Tech Innovation Challenge Chooses Haystax School Safety Solution as Finalist
McLean, VA (PRWEB) September 18, 2015 -- Haystax Technology, a leading provider of advanced analytics and cybersecurity solutions, announced Haystax School Safety Center has been selected as a finalist in the Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) Challenge, a technology showcase designed to bring innovative technologies and strategies to LCPS to help solve some of the school system’s hard-to-solve problems.
LCPS, a large school district located in Northern Virginia just outside Washington DC, established safety and security as one of the four challenge subjects, along with administrative decision support systems, 21st-century classroom technologies, and technology and tools to support education solutions.
According to Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, “These issues identified by LCPS are not unique to Loudoun County. School districts across the nation are facing these same challenges, and LCPS is hoping to implement these solutions in pilot programs to pave the way for the other school districts.”
Haystax's solution addresses a number of safety and security issues, offering a collaborative online system that will enable all school safety stakeholders to dynamically monitor threats and analyze risks using real-time data sources, and to maintain a comprehensive and detailed understanding of their school-related assets.
Hosted in the Amazon Web Services cloud environment, the School Safety Center can cost-effectively provide authorized users across multiple and overlapping jurisdictions with a common real-time operating picture of their security environment. And because the system is deployed in the cloud, this operating picture is available any time and anywhere, on any device, allowing users to better prepare for, mitigate, respond to and recover from any threat or risk they may face.
Loudoun County is home to 85 schools, serving more than 70,000 students from kindergarten through the 12th grade. Among the specific challenges school districts like LCPS confront every day are:
• There is no cost-effective way to keep up with the increasing volume of threat activity taking place on social networks and other digital media;
• Reporting and monitoring incidents across the full spectrum of threats and natural hazards is spread over multiple systems, and there is no standardized way to quickly share alerts with all the jurisdictions and agencies that have security responsibilities;
• Assessing threats and vulnerabilities at each school is a time-consuming process, and the data collected is rarely analytically useful; and
• Detailed data and contact information on each school facility is lacking, and critical documents are often scattered across multiple computer networks – or even available only in printed form.
The Haystax School Safety Center can help LCPS schools overcome these and other challenges in the following ways:
• Police chiefs and the county sheriff will gain vastly improved on-the-ground intelligence;
• First responders will have critical information such as floor plans, emergency plans, key contact information and photos of key personnel at their fingertips in a single rapidly accessible location;
• The LCPS superintendent and school principals – as well as school staff and teachers – will have greater situational awareness of threats in and around their campuses, plus the ability to generate analytic reports that can help them make better-informed resourcing and policy planning decisions;
• Officers, security guards and school personnel will have the tools to more quickly report incidents from wherever they may be; and
• Field assessors will be able to streamline the process of conducting safety assessments on each school.
With the Haystax system in place, Loudoun County students, parents, school staff and community leaders will gain greater peace of mind that their school safety officials have gotten out in front of threats in ways not previously thought possible.
The LCPS Challenge is the brainchild of a group of Northern Virginia-based organizations, including the Innovative Solutions Consortium (ISC), the Loudoun County Department of Economic Development and the Loudoun County Chamber of Commerce.
Awardees will be chosen at an LCPS Challenge Event on October 22 in Leesburg, VA. The event will feature presentations by Haystax and other finalists in front of a panel of judges composed of leading officials from federal and local government, academia and high-tech industry organizations. Among the awards to be granted are Most Disruptive Technology and Most Innovative Technology, as well as a Future Innovators Award aimed specifically at students. The event will also include a keynote address by Governor McAuliffe.
About Haystax Technology
Haystax Technology, Inc. is a leading provider of advanced analytics and cybersecurity solutions. Haystax provides a full range of services and analytic products to protect and certify mission-critical information and real-time actionable intelligence for total enterprise protection. Haystax solutions are relied upon every day to protect against threats to some of the most mission critical and high profile networks and institutions in the world. Haystax Technology is headquartered in McLean, Virginia, with offices in Herndon, Virginia, Raleigh, North Carolina, and San Francisco. For more information about Haystax, visit http://www.haystax.com or follow Haystax on Twitter @haystaxtech.
Jaffrey Ali, Haystax Technology, http://www.haystax.com, +1 202-492-5457, [email protected]
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