Motorola Solutions makes remote network management a reality with CirrusCentral Management

Motorola Solutions recently announced CirrusCentral Management, a cloud-based network-management solution that lets authorized personnel monitor the performance of an ASTRO 25 system from remote locations, according to a company official.

Paul Steinberg, senior vice president of technology for Motorola Solutions, said authorized network users can access the subscription-based CirrusCentral from a computer or smart device, so they don’t have to be in a network operations center to evaluate the health of the P25 system. To ensure security, users log in via two-factor authentication, he said.

“In a nutshell, we’ve taken network management, and we’ve made it accessible to a lot of places, so we gave a lot of flexibility to our customers, in terms of how they stay plugged into the network,” Steinberg said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications.

CirrusCentral Management features a dashboard that provides statistics and alerts about the real-time performance of the ASTRO 25 network, including network loading and usage data, as well as supporting call-monitoring and network-troubleshooting functionality, Steinberg said.

“In a topological point of view, it applies some analytics to actually aggregate the alarms, because one of the big challenges with most network-management platforms is they report a lot of problems, but oftentimes there’s only one real root for that,” he said. “The real trick is to cut the wheat from the chaff.”

At its core, CirrusCentral Management utilizes the same information platform that Motorola Solutions personnel use in the company’s network operations center for customers that have Motorola Solutions operate or manage their networks, Steinberg said.

“It’s a little different set of tools, but it’s exactly the same platform, underpinnings and data,” Steinberg said.

“We built some capability into the platform to aggregate and to produce a little more data to make it more usable. But fundamentally, [the difference is] really the user interface and the applications that we wrapped around it, making the intrinsic ability of the platform itself to be more manageable, more usable and more flexible.”

Such flexibility is especially relevant at this time, when health and government officials are advocating social-distancing and stay-at-home measures in an effort to prevent spread of the COVID-19 virus.

“Basically, you can really run the network from almost anywhere,” Steinberg said. “The only time you need to be with it is when you need to touch it to repair it or whatever the case may be.”

Currently, the CirrusCentral Management is only available to monitor an ASTRO 25 network, but Motorola Solutions is “looking at” possibly expanding the scope to include offerings such as its Critical Connect interoperability platform and MOTOTRBO DMR systems.

CirrusCentral Management is available immediately, and it can be implemented quickly, according to Steinberg.

“I don’t think it takes very long [to deploy]—it’s literally a matter of days, if even that. It’s really more about making sure we get the connection between the zone controller for the ASTRO system to our portal,” he said. “Once the portal’s there, it’s a very quick process.”