Al Brisard
Exacom
Imagine it’s August. A Category 3 hurricane has been tracking toward your coastline for four days. Your center is operating on backup power. Your team is handling ten times normal call volume and your recording server is sitting in a facility that may flood by morning.
When the power goes out and the water rises, your team keeps answering calls. But the server storing every one of those recordings, every dispatched unit, every critical decision made on headset, is in the same building you’re not sure will be standing by morning.
This isn’t a hypothetical that is unique to the Gulf Coast. It’s the operating possibility for any PSAP that relies entirely on on-premise recording infrastructure when disaster strikes.
It raises a question worth asking before the next storm is in the forecast: if your building goes down, do your recordings go with it?
Your On-Premise System Works. That’s Not the Problem.
On-premise platforms are built on stable, proven software and many systems will use Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) hardware to keep maintenance straightforward and costs predictable. Your team knows the system. Your processes are built around it.
The question isn’t whether it works. The question you must ask is what happens to my recordings when disaster strikes?
Traditional on-premise recording infrastructure comes with inevitable, heightened vulnerability to disasters, power failures, and the compounding risks of aging equipment. When those factors converge, it’s right when the system faces maximum stress.
For PSAPs running aging servers, the risk compounds over time. A 2024 New York State audit found that prolonged dependence on aging 911 infrastructure increases the likelihood that systems will fail to function properly during large-scale emergency events. And that is when the continuity of your systems and communications record matters most.
There is a regulatory dimension here as well. FCC rules that took effect April 2025 require service providers to notify affected PSAPs within 30 minutes of discovering a potential 911-impacting outage. When recordings become inaccessible during that outage, demonstrating continuity of operations is not optional. An on-premise system that goes dark in a flood doesn’t help you meet that standard.
When the Recordings Are Gone, So Is the Record
The moment a disaster passes, the investigation begins. What was communicated? By whom? When?
After-action reports (AARs) don’t write themselves from memory. They require a documented record of what was said, when, and how the center responded in real time. For agencies required to submit AARs after a declared disaster, a gap in the recording is a hole in the report that no amount of recollection can fill.
In the wake of Hurricane Harvey, recordings of 911 calls later revealed a systemic failure: information about a woman’s deteriorating medical condition had not been communicated between call takers. That failure was identified — and could be corrected — only because the recordings existed and were accessible after the storm.
If those recordings had been stored on infrastructure that the storm took offline, that investigation couldn’t happen. The systemic failure doesn’t get identified. The same mistake gets made again.
Recordings are also legal instruments, and disasters don’t pause the legal calendar. A missing recording from a storm event can surface months later as an evidentiary gap in a criminal case, a civil suit, or a public-records request. Courts have admitted 911 recordings as evidence in criminal trials. A gap in that record isn’t just an operational inconvenience — it can change an outcome.
Disaster calls are also the most instructive recordings a center will ever have. The calls your dispatchers handle during a flood or wildfire are the ones a QA supervisor needs to review for protocol adherence, dispatcher performance, and process improvement. If the system that stored them went down with the building, that learning is gone permanently.
Switching to Hybrid-Cloud Recording Doesn’t Mean Starting Over – It’s Adding a Layer
Switching to a cloud model doesn’t mean you have to abandon what’s working. It’s an opportunity to build upon your on-premise foundation, by adding an additional layer of redundancy.
Before making this decision, it’s important to know what the right fit for your situation is when it comes to legal requirements, staff and budget. Cloud systems provide the benefit of elastic storage, that can be expanded or reduced based on need, that is stored safely in the cloud.
For most PSAPs making this transition, the natural next step is a hybrid-cloud solution. That means your existing on-premise hardware continues to capture recordings exactly as it does today, while those recordings are simultaneously written to a secure, cloud-native platform built specifically for public safety recordings. A geographically remote copy of every recording exists independently of your facility, on infrastructure that is CJIS compliant and built to government security standards.
That means if your building floods, loses power, or becomes inaccessible, your recordings are not in the building. They are in the cloud, reachable from any authorized device at a backup site or mobile facility the same day the storm passes, not days later when the investigation has already started without a record.
The investigation has its evidence, the legal record is intact, and the after-action report has a foundation.
With access to cloud your recordings are not only stored safely but cloud opens the door to new AI features and easy automatic software updates that traditional on-premise recording systems cannot provide.
