Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and VPN
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog on
I’m a sucker for a ’stupid security’ story, and have to admit getting a certain amount of satisfaction from exposing those organisations which just do not get security best practise although I do not relish the consequences of the security stinkers which all too often impacts upon the data of innocent third parties.
However, every now and then I get caught in a happy mood and a good news story crosses my path which makes me smile. Such is the case of the Shropshire Fire and Rescue service which has just recently given fire crews better access to the emergency incident risk data they rely upon. The security angle being that it is all thanks to a new secure Virtual Private Network from CI-Net.
“The new network is designed to gives us a reliable, resilient infrastructure for the flow of information to the individual stations from our headquarters in Shrewsbury,” explained John Rix, network manager at Shropshire Fire and Rescue, which employs 318 fire fighters serving a population of approximately 448,900.
Risk data can be sent to fire stations around the county, across the secure VPN, and then downloaded to touch-screen computers actually on board the emergency vehicles, as well as onto appliances via wireless network connections within each station itself.
The kind of risk data concerned includes updates to mapping information, building layouts and incident specific data. All the kind of stuff that needs to be communicated to fire crews, and can now be sent more quickly to them even when they are on the way to a ’shout’ with much improved reliability.
CI-Net has designed a meshed VPN allowing the headquarters office to communicate effectively with the remote fire station sites. “Previously we had to have someone within the individual fire stations create a dial-up link to HQ,” said Rix. “This could be slow and unreliable and we often experienced technical problems. For the on-board computers within our fire vehicles or appliances, we’d written a specific software script to create an automatic VPN connection via wireless access points in the fire stations. But if the VPN didn’t work, we could lose connectivity, delaying the availability of risk data relating to emergency calls.”
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