Cloud Shines Brightly as Future of Disaster Response IT

The call for help began as a rumble.

Twenty miles beneath the ocean’s surface, a rupture in a massive tectonic plate ripped a 310 mile-long break in the sea floor, sending an army of seismic waves to the coast of Japan, a geologic event as unavoidable and uncontrollable as it was unpredictable. By the time the earth again stood still and the subsequent tsunami receded from Japanese shores, the enormity of the tragedy was left to see, even as so much of the landscape was wiped clean by the waves.

Responding in Haiti
Help From Above The 2010 earthquake in Haiti brought out the best in the world’s desire to help, but also brought an avalanche of inter-operability issues. At the request of an Intelligence Agency and under the auspices of NCOIC, NJVC led a simulated response to the disaster, demonstrating the effectiveness of the cloud in disaster responses in 2013. Lessons learned from this event were presented on Thursday, Sept. 12, at the Gannett Building in McLean, VA. For more on the project, visit ncoic.org, and check back at NJVC.com

Even in as technologically advanced, disaster-prepared nation as Japan, the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami were overwhelming, registering historic on the seismic meter of tragedy and loss.

In the disaster, however, were the beginnings of a promise for a more responsive future: implementation of cloud computing as a technology for relief—a call for help answered before the roar had stopped.

“The disaster proved the cloud’s ability, efficiency and advantages in emergency response on a national basis,” Ben Katsumi, chief researcher, Information-Technology Promotion Agency, Japan, concluded in a 2013 presentation at CloudScape V.

Humanitarian disasters are as ancient as humanity itself, but the connection revolution that created the global village has made distant lands nearby neighbors. From the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 to the earthquakes in Chile, Haiti and Japan, awareness of disasters reaches around the globe in time measured in milliseconds. Local disasters, perhaps smaller in scale, are no less hurtful in relative terms and face similar challenges in disaster response.

Yet as global reach increases, so does global responsibility.

While awareness of disaster is near instantaneous, from tornados in Alabama to a tsunami in Banda Aceh, cloud computing is a technology that makes achievable the desire to help in a way inconceivable a decade earlier.

In the Japanese disaster, the outlines of cloud computing as a response tool were drawn from crowd sourced sites, like USHAHIDI and Google’s PeopleFinder to Microsoft’s deployment of its cloud applications and platform for development of disaster-specific apps.

In a demonstration by the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC), Sept. 12,  which will discuss learned from a recreation of the 2010 Haitian earthquake response, the outline of cloud computing as a disaster response tool will be further filled in. When disaster strikes, the desire to help is universal. In the near future, cloud computing can be the technology that makes global reach a reality.

Disaster response IT comprises the same building blocks as traditional IT—servers, networks, applications and the like—but its deployment is as unpredictable as the disasters themselves. Moreover, in the best-case scenario, money invested in response technology will never be used in practice. For disaster responders, this unique challenge creates an intricate calculus of benefit against cost, in which, unlike traditional IT, what sits in the balance is human life and well-being, rather than simply productivity and efficiency. With lives on the line, pennies can’t easily be pinched, leading to solutions which may address an unlikely scale of disaster. Alternately, over engineering for the worst case may result in wasted dollars in already tight federal, state and local IT budgets.

Additionally, implementation is unlike anything else in IT. Instead of immaculately maintained, temperature-regulated server rooms, systems are often deployed in the world’s rawest conditions, where performance must be reliable despite imperfect surroundings.

The solution, said Kevin L. Jackson, NJVC Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Services, is cloud computing, whose strengths neatly fill in the gaps of existing disaster IT.

“For emergency responders, cloud computing and cloud services brokerage are not just game changers, they’re a whole new ballgame,” Jackson said. “This is do-more-with-less in enterprise technology. By only paying for the services you consume, you’re providing first responders access to better technology at a much lower price without many of the traditional obstacles of deploying warehouses of IT equipment. By moving infrastructure out of the disaster are, you’re greatly reducing risk.” Jackson believes the same benefits that private business have realized through cloud computing can be utilized by emergency responders, whose actions don’t simply save dollars, but lives.

When disaster IT is in use, it’s vital. When it isn’t, it’s simply an expense.

Unlike an office e-mail server, most disaster response IT isn’t in constant use,

 but the lifecycle cost is, eating away at already tight budgets.

Kevin L. Jackson
Kevin L. Jackson, NJVC Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Services is a leading voice in federal and commercial cloud strategy. Kevin is the author of the Cloud Musings blog and two books on federal cloud computing. Read More Contact Kevin | Request Interview

Cloud computing, and particularly provisioning through a cloud services brokerage (CSB) platform, allows disaster responders to create comprehensive response systems that fully meet extreme requirements without sacrificing the budget it would take to support those solutions if they were locally owned, hosted and maintained.

“Cloud computing is a technology that is ideal for disaster response,” Jackson said. “Instead of leveraging IT budgets to maintain and upgrade hardware and software, cloud allows responders to devote more IT dollars to the mission of response. Disaster response should be about people helping people, not managing technology.”

Migrations to cloud-based disaster response are already underway. Following the 2011 earthquake, Japan’s Shizuoka Prefecture, developed an emergency management system in the cloud, which goes live when disaster warnings are issued.

It is a testament to the best in humanity and the worst in IT that the problem in disaster response is the how-to, not the want-to. According to lessons learned from many disaster responses, both global and local, the headquarters of disaster response is a high-tech Tower of Babel. Between language barriers, software integration problems and wildly differing circumstances locally, the inability of responders to communicate routinely appears as the single biggest problem.

Often, multiple groups of responders also mean huge amounts of geospatial data of differing quality multiple applications and a lack of information sharing, which can impact mission success. A 2009 report by the Red Cross listed “leadership and coordination” first among its lessons learned following the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. It is a theme often repeated.

“Many of the biggest problems in humanitarian disasters are that response groups, all well-intentioned, simply don’t speak the same language on many levels,” Jackson said. “They are working on different systems in different languages, blunting the full capability of disaster response and negatively impacting their combined mission.”

At the request of an Intelligence Community agency and under the auspices of NCOIC, NJVC led a group to reenact the 2010 Haiti earthquake response using cloud technology to create playbook for multi-national response. NJVC provided its Cloudcuity Brokerage and Management Portal to bring together responder applications and services and foster interoperable standards.  “One of the most important elements in response is that everyone works from the same high-quality information,” Jackson said. “Cloud-based interoperable standards are a most important tool to keeping multiple responding organizations on the same page.”

In a lessons learned report on the Haiti earthquake, Dennis King, Department of State, Humanitarian Information Unit, wrote that technology utilizing interoperable standards is the most beneficial in disaster response. “Tools and technologies that are interoperable, non-proprietary no/low-cost, self-contained, easy to access and easy to use are the most effective,” King explained in an October 2010 issue of Humanitarian Exchange Magazine. Use of cloud, particularly CSB, best supports sharing of information and applications across the response team.

“The 2010 earthquake demonstrated that development will never be successful if we don’t build risk reduction into our core,” concluded Theirry Mayard-Paul, Haiti Chief of Staff and Minister of Interior, Territorial Collectives and National Defense, in a 2012 presentation to the Consultative Group Meeting of the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery. Cloud computing is, by its nature, a risk-reduction vehicle. Failover clouds create redundancy. Servers located far from the disaster mitigate the risk to further damage. Infrastructure hosted in non-damaged areas reduces the risk of further complications following a disaster—such as earthquake aftershocks or civil unrest—impeding disaster response.

Ensure Mission Continuity

Improved Time to Live and Scalability

Crowdsourcing—Letting Survivors Help

Moving at the Speed of Need