County dispatchers exercise the back-up site

NEWTON — The Sussex County Sheriff’s Office recently exercised its communications backup facility housed at the Sheriff’s Office facility in Newton.
Rather than answering 911 calls and dispatching emergency service resources from Frankford Township, communications personnel ran the operations from the hot site located at the Sheriff’s Office facility in Newton.
This backup facility, often referred to as a “hot site”, serves as a redundant communications site to the center located in Frankford Township. Real time synchronization between the two sites is used to completely mirror the environment of the main communications site in Frankford using wide area network links and specialized software.
In the event of a disruption to the main Frankford site, personnel can relocate to this hot site and resume operations with minimal downtime. In lessons learned from 9/11 this hot site provides for complete redundant emergency communications capabilities from a geographically different location.
Sheriff Strada said, “It's great to see that we are prepared should we ever have a disruption.”