On Friday, February 3 – Houston-area first responders were facing a highly dynamic and rapidly evolving public and school safety emergency. And like many school safety incidents, arriving first responders needed immediate access to accurate data and information – including facility maps – to assess their situation and act quickly. While no students, staff or police were injured, and the suspect quickly detained – Houston Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) Administrator David Lindsey, and Nathan Byrd, MSM Critical Infrastructure Liaison, attribute use of Haystax real-time intelligence and da ..read more

This is National Safe Schools Week for the year 2021. As in previous years, there’s some good news and some bad news for those individuals and organizations that are dedicated to ensuring that schools maintain a safe and nurturing learning environment. The bad news is that school violence is again on the rise after dropping last year. According to EdWeek, from January 1 through mid-October 2021 there have been 24 school shootings – 16 of them just since August 1. The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting remote learning wave appear to have interrupted the upward trend in 2020, with 10 shootings tota ..read more

The ability to view critical assets on a map in relation to other geo-tagged information is essential to any successful all-hazard risk management activity, from prevention and preparedness to response and recovery. The Haystax engineering team has developed some powerful new map capabilities to enhance our users’ domain awareness and increase their decision-making speed. Two of the most significant improvements have been made to the map that’s displayed in the Location pane of each page in the Assets app. One enables the optional display of nearby assets (image below left) to increase the use ..read more

By John Boatman For over two decades, Haystax has maintained that security assessments are the best tool for risk managers to understand their threats and vulnerabilities. With dozens of pre-configured and custom assessments to choose from, Haystax users currently are able to assess everything from school safety, fire pre-plans and post-disaster damage to the risk of potential insider threats at government agencies and corporations. In a succession of product enhancements over the past six months, the Haystax software engineering team has now added a powerful new capability to our toolkit: an ..read more

The U.S. Department of Justice has identified school safety assessments as the top ‘essential action’ schools, school districts and law enforcement agencies can take to improve campus safety, according to a recent report released by DoJ’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. The report states that a comprehensive risk assessment that identifies the highest-probability threats, their potential consequences, and the school or school district’s vulnerabilities to those threats is the “foundation for all school safety and security planning and operations.” Assessments are number one out ..read more

The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season has become so active that the National Hurricane Center may run out of alphabet letters before it can name all the remaining storms. In its regular midseason update earlier this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) upgraded its hurricane forecast to between 19 and 25 named storms, of which seven to 11 will become hurricanes – including three to six major (i.e., Category 3, 4, or 5) hurricanes. NOAA said an average season produces 12 named storms, including six hurricanes – of which three become major hurricanes. Confirming the tre ..read more

ASIS International has selected two Haystax school safety clients to present at the security association’s annual conference in late September. Our ‘Risk Management for School Safety Directors’ panel will consist of Chief John Newman of Hillsborough County (FL) Public Schools, and Zachary Pope, Emergency Manager of Arlington (VA) County Public Schools. Haystax Director of Field Operations Douglas Pasley will moderate the panel. No school is immune to risk, be it from active shooters or gang violence, bullying, drugs or natural hazards like earthquakes and floods. School district leaders must w ..read more

Seasoned security professionals who want to understand the full spectrum of risk facing their most valued assets know to start by conducting an assessment. These go by various names, including safety assessment and security audit, but in the security director’s mind the end goal is the same: first help me to identify all potential threats and hazards facing my personnel, facilities and systems, and then to gauge my vulnerability to the most likely threats as well as the consequences were each threat to became a reality. Haystax users deploy our Assessments app in very different ways, from gaug ..read more

As the new coronavirus continues its rapid march across the U.S., virtually every emergency operations center at the state, regional or local level has been activated and is directly involved in the response. Since many of the responsible agencies are Haystax clients, we’ve been able to witness first-hand the extraordinary commitment and courage of the professionals who put their lives on the line to ensure their communities remain safe and secure. Haystax, a business unit of Fishtech Group, has been supporting our customers in California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Virginia and elsewhere as the ..read more

The 2020 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards have been announced, and Haystax has won Gold awards in all three categories for which it was nominated. Haystax, a business unit of Fishtech Group, was declared the Most Innovative Cybersecurity Company in North America with 50-99 employees for its “revolutionary analytics approach that addresses any complex physical- or cyber-security challenge where analysts are drowning in data, or decision-makers lack the actionable intelligence to make critical decisions quickly and with confidence.” The security analytics pioneer’s two other Gold awards were in t ..read more