News & Events: Xceedium Participates In Disaster Demonstration
News & Events
Xceedium To Participate In Strong Angel III Integrated Disaster Response Demonstration
Distinguished Government Officials To View Secure, Remote IT Operations Access Of Distributed Infrastructures To Prepare For Lights-Out Emergency
Jersey City, NJ – August 14, 2006 –Xceedium, a company that provides a centralized solution for secure remote IT operations management, today announced its participation in Strong Angel III, a collaborative demonstration of civil and military cooperation and communication capabilities put together by a partnership of private companies, government agencies, humanitarian and relief agencies and universities. Hosted by San Diego State University and taking place in San Diego August 21-26, Strong Angel III will field test effective means of delivering life-saving humanitarian relief and rapidly deployable communications systems in the wake of major disasters.
The Strong Angel III demonstration simulates the impact on information sharing in a real-world disaster. The demonstration will assume the context of a worldwide pandemic caused by a highly contagious virus, which is further complicated by a wave of cyber-attacks inflicted by terrorists that cripple critical local infrastructure and systems. Strong Angel III team members will conduct field trials and demonstrations of solutions that address 49 specific humanitarian relief challenges – both technical and social – that have not yet been adequately overcome in real disaster relief efforts.
The Strong Angel III demonstration will benefit from Xceedium's remote, touch-free IT operations management technology because of its enhanced security, agility, mobility. Other benefits include:
- Total touch-free support for all components and systems
- Ability to manage geographically distributed and mobile infrastructure
- Secure remote access deployed within quarantine or hot zones
- Separation and segregation of activity for high security situations
- Compartmentalized access with discreet connections that deliver complete audit and compliance tracking
- Mobile browser-based access with zero footprint
- On-the-fly role-based access for non-predictable constituencies
- Ability to connect to multiple data centers simultaneously
"In the case of crises such as Bird Flu, natural disaster and terrorist attacks, it is imperative governments be equipped with technology that will help them respond quickly and more effectively to bring back essential services,” said Cheryl Traverse, president/CEO of Xceedium. “GateKeeper enables civilian and government personnel to light up and deliver support for all components and systems in these mobile data centers."
The core site for Strong Angel III will be the operations center at the San Diego Fire Department Fire Rescue Training Facility site, located at the former Naval Training Center near downtown San Diego. San Diego State University’s Visualization Center will be a secondary location.
"In the wake of major incidents like the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami in Southeast Asia, it is more important than ever to have an integrated response when disaster strikes,” said Eric Rasmussen, MD, director of Strong Angel III and professor at San Diego State University. “Public-and private-sector engagement in Strong Angel III is at remarkable levels, underscoring the significance of the task at hand and the commitment of everyone involved to work together to maximize preparedness and coordination efforts."
Some of the demonstrations will include developing solutions for redundant power, adaptive communications, austere network communications, mobile workers, cross-organizational collaboration, mesh networking, satellite services, ephemeral workgroups, geospatial information systems, rapid assessment techniques, shared situational awareness, cyber-security, alerting tools, community informatics, machine-based translation for multi-lingual communication, and social network development.
Strong Angel III sponsors include Bell Canada, Cisco Systems, CommsFirst, Google, Microsoft, Save the Children, Sprint Nextel, the Naval Postgraduate School, and the U.S. Department of Defense.
About Xceedium
Xceedium provides centralized, policy-based, secure access for IT operations management. The most comprehensive solution available, Xceedium's service-oriented framework delivers vendor access control and secure touch-free support for IT infrastructure across geographically distributed data centers. Xceedium's solution is platform-independent, integrates in-band, out-of-band and power and includes blade and legacy architectures. This increases security, reduces costs, provides audit tracking, and improves service levels. Xceedium's, Common Criteria and FIPS 140 compliant, solution has been successfully deployed at the large government agencies as well as Fortune 1000 companies. Xceedium was founded in 2000 and is headquartered in Jersey City, NJ. For more information about the company, please call (201) 536-1000 ext. 114, email usgovernment@xceedium.com, or visit www.xceedium.com.
About Strong Angel III
Strong Angel III is the third in a series of demonstrations that have taken place since 2000. The first two Strong Angel demonstrations were held in 2000 and 2004 in Hawaii associated with the joint Naval exercises called RIMPAC. The primary goals of Strong Angel III are to field-test and demonstrate effective means of delivering life-saving humanitarian relief in the wake of natural and man-made disasters, to foster close collaboration and communications between aid agencies, governments and military in providing disaster relief, to provide local communities with solutions that will help them cope with disasters more immediately and effectively, and to enable military forces to better prepare for and execute humanitarian relief efforts. Strong Angel III will issue a lessons-learned document on its website as soon as possible after conclusion of the demonstration. For more information on Strong Angel III and a listing of participating public- and private-sector organizations, please visit www.strongangel3.net.
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