Two-thirds of PSAPs experienced outages last year, according to Stratus Technologies survey

Many enterprises have moved to cloud-based solutions to increase their uptime, but that is not the case with the PSAPs represented in the survey—72% of respondents said their PSAP is not considering a move to a cloud-based solution.

“That’s a little different than what we’re hearing from some the vendors,” LeClair said. “Some of the actual ISVs [independent software vendors] in this space are moving quickly to migrate their applications to come up with cloud offers. We certainly see that in other industries, but it’s interesting that it’s not showing up in these surveys [of PSAPs].

“That may be an indication of the hype of cloud getting ahead of where the market is in this particular market.”

Other factors also may help explain the lack of enthusiasm to cloud-based solutions, LeClair said. Adoption of cloud solutions typically follows migration to an all-IP infrastructure and virtualization, and many PSAPs still have not taken those steps.

Furthermore, cloud-based solutions are only effective if reliable connectivity exists to the cloud servers. If PSAPs have any concerns about their connectivity options in a challenging scenario, they may opt to keep their applications on site, LeClair said.

“Availability is a challenge in the cloud,” he said. “So, it’s probably no surprise that, in this particular vertical market where the applications are so mission-critical, that they would be one of the last to start moving to the cloud.”

Another issue for PSAPs is funding to pay for technological upgrades at a time when simply maintaining current operations is a financial challenge.

“In the current economic environment, it’s not like there are a lot of spare dollars to throw at these initiatives,” LeClair said. “I think it’s going to continue to be a steady migration to some of the new technologies, with next-gen 911 slowly moving to a virtualized environment and trying to continue add investment where they can to try to shore up of these areas of downtime.”