For over 25 years, Haystax has been the provider of world-class commercial software products for direct use by individuals in the agencies charged with protecting our communities, cities, and country. Thus, our product is one of the most widely deployed risk management software solutions, used by school, law enforcement, fire, emergency management, and other government agencies across the United States.

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Haystax for School Safety

Haystax meets the constantly evolving challenges of providing safe learning environments for students, faculty, staff, and local security partners by integrating all vital incident and school facility information into a single, online platform.  Physical assessments and behavioral assessments along with the ability to report and monitor incidents on or near campus are hallmarks of Haystax for School Safety.  Know your threats sooner, respond faster, and effectively coordinate actions for all stakeholders.

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Haystax for Public Safety

Law enforcement professionals are called upon daily to perform a broad range of tasks—from routine patrols, intelligence gathering and investigations to major crime and incident responses. Their challenge is to ensure public safety despite incomplete intelligence, limited cross-jurisdictional information sharing, and tight budgets. Haystax helps law enforcement agencies prepare for and respond to any crisis with a dynamic picture of emerging threats, rapid  intelligence-collection and incident-reporting tools, and a seamlessly integrated user environment that  ensures maximum collaboration and analytically sound command decisions for rapid response.

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Haystax for Enterprise Security

Haystax has developed a suite of applications designed specifically to help corporate security decision-makers and analysts navigate this challenging environment. Haystax alerts corporate leaders to their most likely threats and natural hazards, provides critical security and operational information about each physical facility, regardless of its size or geographic location, and allows risk managers to identify and mitigate their biggest vulnerabilities. Moreover, the Haystax platform enables security teams to manage incidents and major events—from the ops center or out in the field.

Equipped with these insights, CSOs can better anticipate their risks, communicate with leadership and limit their company’s exposure to financial, legal and reputational liabilities.

PrevHaystax School Safety Center Featured in Public Safety Magazine04 May 2015NextNext-Gen Streaming Analytics and Cybersecurity11 May 2015

Baltimore School Warning Was Just a Tweet Away

May 7, 2015

Several hours before the Baltimore riots broke out on the afternoon of April 27, a handful of social media posts could have changed the course of how schools in the area responded. One tweet read: “BaltimorePolice say ‘credible threat’ shows gangs including Crips & Bloods partnered-up to ‘take-out’ law enforcement officers.” Another social media post advertising a violent “purge” starting at 3 p.m. that day at an area mall, which was widely recirculated among students starting late morning, provided a similar kind of early warning indicator of the troubles to come. Had school officials in the area seen this information when it first broke on Twitter, they could have used it to shut down Baltimore City and County Public Schools more quickly, helping to convey students safely away from the confrontations and arrive home sooner. But school officials in Baltimore, like most schools around the country, did not have the resources or capabilities to sift through all the noise of social media to identify activity that posed the biggest threat. Without this information, Baltimore-area schools dismissed students just as police were assembling in the streets around 3 p.m., hindering bus, car and pedestrian routes home. This was a complex and fast-moving situation with many decision-makers and stakeholders spread across multiple jurisdictions. Even for those monitoring social media on a regular basis, it would have been very difficult to know precisely which feeds, threads, posts or tweets to pay attention to – to discern which were the most important and which could pose the greatest danger to students, staff and school facilities. This is exactly what Haystax Technology’s School Safety Center is designed to do. Its Threat Streams app dynamically analyzes and prioritizes the most important pieces of information so school safety stakeholders can understand context, see patterns and take action quickly. In the case of the Baltimore riots, the technology was able to identify particular tweets and immediately raise them to the level of a significant threat, filtering out less pertinent tweets that had little bearing on student or public safety (see screen images below). Since no local organizations were using the Haystax School Safety Center at the time, they also operated without the benefit of any additional context-specific information – such as geo-located school facilities, emergency plans and mobile field alerts from officers – that could have further aided in analyzing and responding to a rapidly escalating situation. Even without that additional context, however, it was instructive to see what the Threat Streams app alone turned up on a very dangerous Monday afternoon in Baltimore.

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Screenshot #1: The Haystax School Safety Center features a Threat Streams app for real-time monitoring of threat information, which analyzes and prioritizes publicly available digital feeds. The left column shows the “purge” and “gangs teaming” posts (second and third from the top) that provided an early indication of the disruptions to come later that day. Baltimore Threat Stream Screenshot #2: Haystax identified and prioritized one related series of tweets and retweets as indicating potential threat activity just after noon Baltimore time on April 27. Such posts can be seen on a map in addition to the Threat Streams viewing page. Baltimore School Tweet    

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