The smarter way for the public sector to run incident response meetings 

As a public sector organization, you need to be ready to respond to critical incidents at a moment’s notice. Threats to national security, natural disasters, public health crises, or critical infrastructure failures all demand quick and decisive reactions.  

These begin by getting the right people together to execute your response playbook. This will typically take place in a videoconference, because there often won’t be time to gather everyone into the same physical location. 

Why a standard managed meeting won’t cut it  

You’ll probably already have the ability to run managed meetings, where an operator oversees proceedings. However, emergency situations demand greater levels of assurance, security, and efficiency than you’ll typically get from a standard managed meeting.  

There are many reasons for this. Incident-response meetings firstly require you to get the right people into the call quickly, even if they’re not currently at their desks or looking at their phones. You haven’t got time to be sending out calendar invites, or calling everyone up individually to ask them to join. 

Secondly, with the call likely discussing sensitive information, operators must be aware of what level of security classification applies, so they can manage the meeting accordingly. 

Thirdly, those on the call will often need to break out into smaller groups to agree their agencies’ responses, before returning to the main meeting to confirm next steps. Here again, you can’t afford the delays and interruptions that would result from asking people to manually move themselves between meetings multiple times during the session. 

Fourthly, with large numbers of participants, some of whom will be joining from remote locations, issues with reachability or connectivity can be common. When a fast response is essential, you don’t want your main response teams wasting time tracking down colleagues or addressing connection issues. Specialist operator support, to take care of this, is essential – provided they don’t become a single point of failure. 

Introducing Advanced Conferencing Center: The better way to run incident-response meetings 

Solutions to most of these problems already exist on various conferencing platforms. But until now, there hasn’t been an off-the-shelf product that solves them all, and that can be used in the self-hosted or air-gapped environments in which public sector incident response meetings must typically take place. 

That’s why we built the Advanced Conferencing Center (ACC) for VQ Conference Manager. 

In Cisco Meeting Server (CMS), you’ve got the resilient on-premises conferencing platform that forms the backbone of many public sector communications. It’s therefore the obvious choice for those critical incident-response meetings. 

VQ Conference Manager has long been the go-to management platform for CMS-based conferencing services, trusted by governments, defense, intelligence agencies, and emergency services organizations all around the world. ACC builds on VQ Conference Manager’s existing capabilities to provide the tools you and your operators need to plan, launch and run efficient incident-response meetings on CMS. 

Let’s have a look at what it includes:

Pre-defined meeting templates for different scenarios 

Each scenario you need to respond to will require different participants, virtual meeting room settings, breakout rooms, and security classification. Set up all of this and more for every emergency situation you require. 

Blast dial to get the right people in the meeting, fast  

When an incident occurs, launch the relevant template, and the system’s blast dial kicks in, automatically calling out to the required people or endpoints. Cisco Unified Communications Manager’s single number reach (SNR) can be used to dial in participants who may have multiple phones. 

Security classification display for operators 

Ensure the operators managing the meeting know what security level they’re overseeing, so that they can ensure only authorized participants are allowed to join. It will also enable them to notify participants if the classification changes during the meeting. A meeting’s classification is displayed prominently in the operator interface. 

Operational support with no single points of failure 

Behind the scenes, operators have powerful insights and controls to support the call. This includes an overview of who has – and hasn’t – joined, so they can chase missing participants or assist anyone having difficulty. 

During the meeting, operators can move individual or groups of participants between the main meeting and the pre-defined breakout rooms in a few clicks. For those in the call, this eliminates the need to move themselves between sessions mid-meeting, leaving them free to focus fully on responding to the incident. 

There’s further assurance through operator analytics and alerts. These highlight call- or participant-level problems to operators, enabling them to intervene to minimize or prevent disruption to the meeting. 

And to avoid single points of failure, the system is designed to be managed by multiple operators. 

The first step on our journey 

The first version of Advanced Conferencing Center is available now, and we’ll be adding further functionality to it in the future, in response to customer needs. 

If you’re responsible for running high-stakes incident response meetings for a public sector organization, and aren’t fully satisfied with your current solution, contact us today to arrange a demo of VQ Conference Manager Advanced Conferencing Center, or find out more on our product page.