The ability to securely and efficiently transfer data is paramount, especially for organizations focused on critical services like fire, EMS, and police departments.
Let’s look at how one organization is enhancing emergency services analytics with SFTP Gateway. Darkhorse, a decision analytics company, leverages SFTP Gateway to help ensure data security and reliability while providing valuable insights to emergency services.
SFTP Gateway is a managed file transfer product developed by Thorn Technologies, offering a robust solution for secure file transfers and ensuring data integrity and compliance.
Introduction to Darkhorse
The Darkhorse Emergency decision analytics platform leverages response and forecasting data to give complete transparency into emergency service performance. This allows agencies to see the impact of resource allocation changes before implementing them, making departments more efficient and effective with every choice.
Darkhorse’s primary focus is on fire departments, with additional support for EMS and police services. It offers a suite of analytics tools designed to optimize resource allocation, strategic planning, and operational performance.
The Darkhorse product includes:
Predictive Analytics: Assists agencies in determining optimal locations for new stations, best staffing practices, and equipment allocation to reduce response times and improve service delivery.
Business Intelligence Dashboards: Visualizes historical response data, maps incidents, and tracks performance metrics to aid decision-making.
Community Risk Assessment Tools: Analyzes census data, population trends, and building inventories to anticipate and mitigate risks.
The Challenge
The core of Darkhorse’s analytics platform relies on large volumes of data from various emergency services, including call histories, response times, and Automated Vehicle Location (AVL) data. This data, often extracted from older systems lacking modern APIs, needs to be transferred securely and efficiently.
Initially, data transfers were managed using an in-house server, but this solution was cumbersome and came with security risks. Manual management of user permissions and server maintenance was neither scalable nor secure. A reliable, secure, and automated method to handle data transfers was required.
Darkhorse and Enhancing Emergency Services Analytics with SFTP Gateway
SFTP Gateway emerged as the ideal solution to the data transfer challenges. It transformed operations in several key ways:
Secure Data Transfers: SFTP Gateway provided a secure method for clients to transfer data, ensuring compliance with stringent security standards.
Efficiency and Reliability: With SFTP Gateway, nightly data transfers from clients are streamlined. This not only reduced manual effort but also ensured timely and consistent data availability for analytics processes.
Simple Integration with AWS: Data is stored in AWS S3 buckets, and SFTP Gateway seamlessly integrates with this setup. Incoming data triggers AWS Lambda functions, which process and ingest the data into databases. This automation allows for up-to-date datasets without manual intervention.
Scalability: As the client base expanded, SFTP Gateway scaled effortlessly. Whether handling nightly exports or initial large data snapshots, the system manages varying data loads without issues.
Real-World Impact
With SFTP Gateway, Darkhorse has provided clients with more accurate and timely analytics. Examples of this impact include:
Optimized Resource Allocation: Using predictive analytics, a fire department relocated a ladder truck to a different station, reducing average response times and improving coverage in high-risk areas.
Strategic Planning: Tools helped a growing community set aside land for future fire stations, ensuring that new developments were adequately protected.
Performance Monitoring: By visualizing response times and incident locations, departments could identify improvement areas and allocate resources more effectively.
By enabling seamless and secure data flows with SFTP Gateway, Darkhorse can focus on its core mission: providing actionable insights that help emergency services save lives and protect communities.
SFTP Gateway can be deployed through the AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or Alibaba Marketplaces. Enterprise plans are also available. For more information about SFTP Gateway and how to get started, please visit thorntech.com/sftpgateway.
