The importance of timeously supplying the correct information to the right people is crucial to the effectiveness of emergency and security services, and these first responders can gain significant value from real-time databases, says German database giant SAP Public Security Europe, Middle East, Africa and India industry director Mark Holder.

Real-time awareness can also enable first responders to provide information from the scene, including video, audio and automatic information such as global positioning system coordinates, as well as other incident-specific and contextual information to other emergency services to inform resource allocation and immediate responses.

Further, the current resources and equipment of these emergency services, such as tracking and smart equipment, can be leveraged and augmented by linking them through SAP’s flagship real-time database system, SAP Hana, to deliver real-time information-gathering and dissemination services.

The new S/4 Hana system, short for Suite 4 Hana, is designed to provide software-as-a-service functionality, and supports the integrated use of multiple applications and back-end systems across various emergency services, notes Holder.

S/4 Hana was released last month and can be applied to deliver rapid search and retrieval functions for various applications used by emergency services across geographically dispersed databases in a cloud format.

For example, the location of a civil disturbance can be sent to police officers, and the locations of injured people and the types of injuries can be sent to paramedical responders. Traffic information can also be presented to emergency personnel in a geoinformation map format, enabling information to be layered according to user needs.

“SAP can deploy an S/4 Hana platform within six to eight weeks, which can deliver significant benefits for emergency and security services,” he adds.

Further, users can also search for information using their smart devices and then display this information alongside or on top of the information they already have, which provides broad functionality for emergency personnel on the ground.

Control-centre staff can use integrated resources available from other services or departments, such as traffic cameras or call centre audio files, to provide their personnel with ancillary or relevant information to provide robust support for teams on the ground.

“The speed at which emergency and security services must respond to information – including information from social media, such as an emergency situation or a potential terrorism threat – and technologies that enable this are changing the face of the emergency and security industries,” notes Holder.

Publicly available information on maps and websites can also be incorporated into the system, after which the information is converted for use by emergency services.

The relevance and validity of information can be managed by applying specifically designed algorithms that govern specific information to be sent to specific users, with the relevance being increased through corroboration, mostly from teams on the ground.