Home

You are here: Home

GVF Press Release

Details: Category: News; Published on Thursday, 17 May 2018 00:00

PRESS RELEASE

SATELLITE INDUSTRY AND UNITED NATIONS TO ENTER OPERATIONAL PHASE OF CRISIS CONNECTIVITY CHARTER FOR SUPPORT OF GLOBAL DISASTER RELIEF

THURSDAY, 17 MAY 2018

LUXEMBOURG – Members of the satellite community have today signed contribution agreements with the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), on behalf of the Emergency Telecommunications Cluster (ETC), stepping up their commitment to support global disaster relief. These contribution agreements are the final steps in operationalizing the Crisis Connectivity Charter signed in 2015 between the EMEA Satellite Operators Association (ESOA), the Global VSAT Forum (GVF), the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Aid (OCHA) and the ETC. The Crisis Connectivity Charter signed by Arabsat, Eutelsat, Global Eagle, Hispasat, Inmarsat, Intelsat, SES, Thuraya and Yahsat, will help the humanitarian community by greatly enhancing their access to vital satellite-based communications when local networks are affected, destroyed or overloaded following disasters.

Under the contribution agreements, the Charter Signatories are now committing satellite equipment and capacity that will be dedicated for humanitarian purposes during emergency responses. The ETC, under the global leadership of WFP, will be able to activate the Charter when disaster strikes and identify which pre-planned solutions are immediately available for any given region and need in order to meet a 24-hour deployment timeline after a crisis.

Satellite services have always played an important role in disaster relief. With the increasing number of protracted, complex emergencies and high demand for bandwidth, the commitments from the global satellite industry are timely and will be critical assets for the humanitarian community. The satellite industry’s contributions will enable Internet access during emergencies to support humanitarian operations including logistics, urgent medical care, food delivery and the coordination of relief efforts.

Since signing the Charter, satellite operators have been active on all continents supporting WFP, governments and NGOs during Hurricanes Irma and Maria, and in Haiti, Nepal and Vanuatu to name just a few. Via satellite they have enabled VOIP, WiFi and Internet Access to support supply logistics, urgent medical care and coordination of relief efforts. The Charter Signatories have also provided training and capacity building for WFP and ETC partners’ field-staff on the installation and use of the satellite equipment to be deployed. Satellite equipment donated will be stored in humanitarian depots located on three continents while pre-allocated bandwidth will cover all regions of the globe.

Member of the week

Semper Fortis Solutions, LLC

Semper Fortis Solutions, LLC creates and provides mission-focused, affordable solutions using innovative technologies to provide Enterprise-wide encryption key management, Multiple Independent Levels of Security (MILS), Cross Domain Solutions, and adaptive analytics for large data sets. We also support customers with Strategic Information Assurance Security consulting—assessing, analyzing and recommending remediation for vulnerabilities in a customers’ internal network and its gateways to the public Internet.

We apply Key Orchestration^TM (KO) to help our customers implement rapid and flexible management of cryptographic keys: KO applies a customer organization’s individual policies to enable automated, responsive key management. KO closely constrains the authority granted to individuals fulfilling each of 4 roles within KO so that no single person can abuse the system. Tens of thousands of cryptographic keys can be re-keyed by KO in a single second.

The MILS capability relies heavily on encryption and encryption management from the KO appliance. Through MILS, SFS can implement a range of secure computing capabilities at different levels of security including multi-persona phone (e.g. private vs. public phone on a single device), separated tablet or laptop that can, from a single device, host multiple virtual systems running on different networks or separated Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Separation means that a single device can support multiple logical computers that can’t penetrate between systems. All hardware including interrupts, application programming interfaces (APIs) and memory addresses are strictly controlled and impenetrable. SFS can even provide a separated cloud which means that we can host multiple separate levels of security (MSLS) via a single multi-tenant cloud all on a single stack of Intel hardware.

The capability to securely share information is enabled via SFS’ software-defined Cross-Domain Solution (CDS); the CDS serve as sentries between VMs that only permit information to pass which has been designated as transferrable between specific VMs.

SFS additionally provides a suite of analytic capabilities which can ingest large amounts of data—numeric, voice, imagery, and video; correlate them, identify relationships and trends, and “tag” elements of specific interest or relevance with metadata which will facilite an operator’s ability to understand information of interest that is present in the data set and future analysis of the data.