AST Digital Magazine February 2017 AST Digital Magaiinse Volume 10 | Page 4

Volume 10
Feb 2017 Edition

Top Public Safety Trends for 2017

One of the top Public Safety Trends are technologies that enable citizen involvement . Citizen portals , social media search & social data aggregation tools are examples of how to take advantage of the information that lies in the hands of our citizens .
By Kalyn Sims , Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure
Year over year , the pace of technology innovation is accelerating . Not too long ago , cloud and mobile technologies were the way of the future . Today , cloud and mobile have become mature and stable platforms that many industries and organizations have successfully adopted .
Every year , Gartner , IDC , Sullivan & Frost , and other technology consulting firms look into the near future and make predictions on what trends will effect organizations and industries over the next few years .
Some of the predicted trends align with the technology roadmaps of our public safety customers . And others don ’ t . So what about technology trends that support the needs for public safety and security agencies ?
Between smart phones , mobile sensors , cameras , computers , cars , and more , advances in technology have exponentially increased the volume and types of data available to public safety agencies . And it has become nearly impossible for agencies to manually make sense of the data within a timeframe for maximum impact . But the public safety technology needs go further than the exploiting big data and analytics to improve services .
Here ’ s a look at the technology trends that public safety and security organization will need to address and begin to adopt in 2017 .
Information of Everything / Big Data Analytics Devices are producing more information than ever before .
The challenge facing public safety agencies is how to make sense of all this information to improve business processes , but more importantly to solve crime and prevent it from happening .
Data from the device mesh needs to be sanitized , aggregated , and visualized in a manner that supports pattern recognition and anomaly identification , which will provide more informed data insight to the non-technical members of a public safety organization , including officers in the field and detectives . Agencies need to be more proactive in their policing , rather than just reactive . To enable this , technology solutions must have embedded analytics that provide proactive alerts based on real-time data feeds .
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