How Hybrid Recording Protects Agencies from the Unexpected

Every agency plans for normal operations, and every agency eventually faces something that falls outside them. The unexpected isn’t a hypothetical in public safety. It’s an inevitable reality.

Sometimes that’s a storm. Sometimes it’s a cyberattack on a Tuesday morning. Sometimes it’s a server that stops functioning without warning, or a situation that forces staff to operate from a location that isn’t the building where the recording hardware lives.

Hybrid recording is designed for exactly those moments, because a hybrid system captures communications using your existing on-premise hardware. It’s important to remember that nothing about that process changes. It simply, simultaneously writes those recordings to a secure, geographically separate cloud platform.

Your recordings exist in two places. And it’s important that the second place is never in your building.

For agencies that have built their operations around on-premise recording and aren’t ready to leave that behind entirely, hybrid is the path that adds resilience without disrupting what’s already working. This will help walk through what hybrid actually protects against and why it’s the right architecture for agencies that can’t afford for the unexpected to become the unrecoverable.

When your team thinks about potential recording system failures, you might picture a natural disaster; a hurricane, a flood, a wildfire, a power outage that takes a server offline. Those scenarios are very real and we covered that already in this article. But weather is only one version of the unexpected.

Cyberattacks against PSAPs are accelerating in both frequency and severity. According to the Public Safety Threat Alliance, attacks jumped from every 74 days in 2024 to every 60 days in 2025, with ransomware causing 100% of these incidents and resulting in up to 25 days of downtime.

Recent incidents highlight the vulnerability:

The Vulnerability Gap

Attackers increasingly target smaller agencies with fewer resources, but cybercrime isn’t the only threat. Nearly 90% of emergency communication centers reported outages last year due to a combination of attacks and aging equipment. When hardware exceeds its lifecycle, failure is an inevitability, not a possibility.

Beyond Technical Failure

Operational “unexpected” events—such as evacuations, facility damage, or mutual aid deployments—can be just as crippling. If your recordings live exclusively on-premise, they become effectively unreachable the moment your staff is separated from the building.

Hybrid models should be built on a straightforward principle: capture locally, store redundantly. Recordings are acquired by your on-premise hardware exactly as they would be normally. In the background, those recordings are simultaneously written to a cloud-native platform built on a trusted cloud provider (such as Amazon AWS GovCloud).

What this means during an unexpected event is straightforward: when your facility goes offline, for any of the reasons mentioned above, your recordings don’t go down with it. An authorized supervisor can access the full recording archive from any device running a standard browser, from a backup site, a mobile facility, or a home office.

This architecture also addresses the cybersecurity threat directly. A ransomware attack on local infrastructure that encrypts or destroys on-site recordings cannot reach a separately maintained, cloud-based copy operating under independent security protocols. It is important to choose a provider that is CJIS compliant and built to government security standards.

For agencies that have concerns about cloud security, it’s not really about the security.

The real question you have to ask yourself is whether a single on-premise server, that has one point of failure, one location, and one hardware lifecycle, would be more secure than a government-compliant cloud platform with geographic redundancy and independent access controls.

The answer, for most PSAPs running legacy hardware, is no.

The major hesitation agencies express about moving away from a fully on-premise model is usually operational.

The questions are normally:

For existing Exacom customers moving to hybrid, the answer to all three is no.

Your team keeps recording the way they always have. Recordings are still captured by your on-premise hardware. Staff still accesses them through the same browser-based HindSight interface they already know. Your existing processes, procedures, and integrations remain in place. The only thing that changes is where the backup lives.

Hybrid isn’t a compromise. For many agencies, it’s the right long-term architecture. Local capture with cloud redundancy, tailored to the infrastructure and operational reality of a specific center.