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.

PrevFinding the Signal Amid the Noise: A Strategy for Managing Noisy Alert Systems15 December 2015NextCybersecurityCybersecurity Ventures Ranks Haystax as a Top Cybersecurity Company to Watch in 201615 January 2016

Threats in LA, NY, FL and TX may have been hoaxes, but terrorism in schools is a real threat

December 20, 2015

The nation’s second-largest public school system, Los Angeles Unified School District, shut down on Tuesday after receiving what was deemed a “credible threat” of violence via email. New York schools, the country’s largest district, faced a very similar threat in the same timeframe, but remained open having deemed the written contents of the email they received suspiciously amateurish. New York officials also had the critical advantage of learning of the LA threat while they were assessing their own. Los Angeles, still reeling from attacks two weeks before in San Bernardino, had no such information on its counterparts across the country. And it remains unclear whether the emailed threats were the work of pranksters or possibly a test by individuals with more sinister intent to gauge public safety responses to the threats. And today, we learned that similar threats were also sent to South Florida, Houston and Dallas on Wednesday evening and two school districts in Indiana shut down due to threats. Whether these threats were “credible” or not, it’s a relief to us that the staff and students in all regions remain safe. But we hope these incidents are instructive to schools across the nation. Sadly, the threat of terrorism in schools is real, as we discussed in our two-part blog series earlier this year. Worldwide terror in schools has been dramatically rising since 2004 and there is evidence that the San Bernardino terrorists may have had plans to attack a local school. Moreover, the mastermind behind last month’s multiple gun and bomb attacks in Paris reportedly also planned attacks on schools and other targets. We work with schools across the country to help make their campuses safer, but most schools still lack a basic ability to monitor threats in real time and to build an understanding of their own vulnerabilities. Just as with the schools we serve in Florida and LA, we first recommend schools undergo thorough safety assessments to identify all the possible crime and safety weaknesses spanning building infrastructure, physical security, safety policies and emergency planning procedures. With this baseline of knowledge, schools can implement the procedures, physical changes and technologies that will make them better equipped to prevent and respond to threats. Another important argument we have been making is for better information sharing – not just within the various school safety stakeholder agencies within a district, but also across districts. LA made absolutely the best decision it could in the time it had and with the information it had at hand, but had the major districts across the nation been in the habit of reaching out to each other during major unfolding events it may have allowed the two largest school districts in the country to realize that each had received the same threat at the same time from an individual claiming to be in both places at once – and to stand down on that basis alone. There are a number of ways the Haystax School Safety Center could improve responses in situations like Los Angeles, including the following.

  • Our Threat Streams tool can pick up on threat-related information on Twitter and from other digital media sources. School safety officials in LA could have received instantaneous ‘flash’ alerts when a threat of major significance was identified. This is viewable either in a list view or on the digital map module that is included with the School Safety Center, helping them create better response plans in real-time.
  • Once the decision was made to close the LA schools, our Asset app storing each school’s floor plans could have been called up to map out the ensuing campus-by-campus search for backpacks or other unattended packages.
  • If a search team found a suspicious item, it could have used our School Safety Reporter mobile app to send data, geolocation information and a photo of the item to an analyst to determine whether or not it posed a threat. Or, once a school was searched and declared threat-free, the search team could have sent an alert via the School Safety Reporter. Subsequently, regular updated reports could have been generated for district and law enforcement leadership showing the number of schools cleared as time went on.

School safety stakeholders face an especially challenging mission – to provide a safe and nurturing environment where kids can learn and develop. We believe School Safety Center is an important component of a more comprehensive approach to school safety, providing risk analytics, incident reporting and digital media monitoring – and information sharing – that allow schools to find the right threat signals amidst all the noise, and respond with greater confidence.

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