The FirstNet mission is to deploy, operate, maintain and improve the first highspeed, nationwide wireless broadband network dedicated to public safety. The goal is to provide a reliable, highly secure, interoperable and innovative public safety communications platform to bring 21st century tools to public safety agencies and first responders, enabling faster and better decisions.
However, large federally created systems often experience availability and performance issues when first deployed. State and local markets require a method to integrate, monitor and test their systems running on FirstNet to guarantee their availability and security during times of crisis. Put simply, failure is not an option.
The level of access and control to state and local systems by a new federal construct concerns many state governments due to the potential impact on their first responder capabilities. Thus, state and local governments will keep their applications running on their infrastructure but want to interface with anticipated federal capabilities available on FirstNet. This requires a secured and assured bridging functionality built to work with FirstNet, which includes flexible interfaces to local applications and data.
Solution Overview
The goal is to create a secure FirstNet Onramp for state and local applications and data, preconfigured to provide deep visibility into application traffic and load tested to help ensure that everything works when needed. Critical factors to consider in this solution include local control, FirstNet capabilities, ease of adoption and the security and availability of both local and federal systems.
The Onramp solutions fall into four categories: security, service assurance, interoperability and testing. Together, the packaged solution limits disruption of first responders’ communication chain via brute force or insider attack, pinpoints performance degradation or application failure to assist with remediation, and provides full testing capability to help enable performance under load. The solutions will be preconfigured to function with FirstNet to help speed integration, reduce cost and maintain compliance with the ability to run on premises, in the cloud or in a hybrid mode.
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