For Puerto Rico, IT planning needs to take into account the very real risk of hurricanes and earthquakes.
The island cannot place its data centers near the coast, in case of a tsunami or flooding. Otherwise, should floods hit, “they’re going to be underwater. They might be working but we cannot access them,” Puerto Rico Chief Innovation and Information Officer Antonio Ramos Guardiola told Government Technology during the recent National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) Annual Conference.
For resilience, Puerto Rico’s government keeps redundant data centers on opposite sides of the island, one at San Juan and another about 100 miles away in Ponce.
The island also needs to maintain different ways of communicating with agencies and network redundancies, including fiber-optic cables and satellite networks.
On the mainland, Hurricane Helene tested the resiliency of North Carolina’s next-gen 911 system. Seventeen public safety answering points (PSAPs) in western North Carolina lost the ability to take calls. The system, however, was able to reroute calls and get them answered smoothly enough that “people in those impacted areas, they don’t realize their call is not going to the local PSAP,” CIO Jim Weaver said during a NASCIO conference panel.
“We had a truck driver who was stuck in floodwaters in North Carolina,” Weaver said. “[He] called his wife, who was in Arkansas. She called the Arkansas 911, they arrived the call to our N-MAC [Network Monitoring and Assistance Center], and we were able to get that trucker rescued. So, this stuff does work, and we’re very proud of that fact.”
