Visual Command Center: visualize more than just points on a map

For many security organizations, the things they are trying to protect go beyond buildings and points on a map.

In the commercial sector, companies need to be able to identify sources of risk to pipelines, railroad lines, electric power lines, and telecommunications transmission lines, to name just a few.

They may also need to look at sources of risk to their supply chain (shipping lanes, air corridors, routes on highways and roads), or to large swaths of property. These are often best represented by lines or shapes on a map.

The public sector, and in particular the Department of Homeland Security, has an interest in protecting borders, critical infrastructure, and sensitive areas like rivers, and ports. Again, these are not points on a map but areas defined by lines or shapes.

Visual Command Center’s powerful visualization technology uniquely enables security and public safety teams to visualize sources of risk to these non-point locations.

In today’s blog post, we’ll look at how Visual Command Center works with assets represented by lines. In the example below, the power grid in the Atlantic Southeast has been plotted. The power grid stretches over 130,000 square miles – hardly something that could be plotted as a single point.

Electric transmission power lines in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina are represented by the blue lines.

Visual Command Center’s configurable alerting can be set to notify users whenever an “line” asset, such as a power line, railroad, or highway, is within a designated distance from a source of risk. So if a high-wind warning or ice storm warning – enemies of power lines – is issued for Wake County and we have power lines in Wake County, Visual Command Center will automatically alert us.

Visual Command Center’s analytical tools also respect lines or areas. A spatial query shape, which could be a jurisdiction, a hurricane path, or a user-drawn shape, will return a list of the intersections of the line data and the query shape. We can instantly interrogate the data to determine that of the nearly 900 transmission lines in those three states, nearly 700 are directly threatened by the projected path of the hurricane, represented by the plume in red below.

Nearly 700 transmission lines are within the projected path of Hurricane Irene.

Visual Command Center gives us numerous ways to initiate action in the face of a threat to our assets. An Excel-formatted report of all potentially affected electric distribution lines is just a single click away. This “risk report” is includes an image of the current situation alongside details of the data feeds of interest. It’s a powerful and effective way for the security team to collaborate with – and demonstrate their value to – others inside and outside of the organization. Operations, business continuity, disaster recovery, public responders, and other teams will benefit from the incident visualization and data provided by the security team.

With Visual Command Center, an Excel report detailing all the affected assets is a single click away.

In my next blog, we’ll take a look at how Visual Command Center can use shapes to represent assets that security teams need to protect.