What “Standards” Means Here
Our goal is not to create paperwork. Our goal is to create measurable expectations that improve outcomes for agencies operating 24/7. Standards should be testable, evidence-based, and written in operational language.
Think of these as “operational guardrails” for cloud-hosted CAD and other public safety workloads: reliability, transparency, recovery, and clear shared responsibility.
Example Standard Domains
1) Availability Measurement & Transparency
Standardize how uptime is calculated, what is excluded, and how agencies can validate performance. Provide a public or customer-visible status page with incident history.
Evidence examples: uptime methodology, status page history, past incident reports, maintenance policy.
2) RPO / RTO (Recovery Objectives)
State recovery objectives clearly, tie them to architecture, and prove them through testing. “Targets” without validation aren’t protection — they’re marketing.
Evidence examples: DR test results, backup restore proof, recovery runbooks, after-action reports.
3) Disaster Recovery & Failover Discipline
Require regular DR exercises with defined success criteria, documented outcomes, and corrective actions. Include both technical failover and operational readiness (communications, staffing, escalation).
Evidence examples: annual DR calendar, tabletop notes, failover records, remediation tracking.
4) Observability & Incident Response
Ensure monitoring is deep enough to detect partial outages, performance degradation, and upstream dependency failures. Require defined severity levels, response times, and agency communication timelines.
Evidence examples: alerting policy, on-call model, incident playbooks, post-incident review templates.
5) Network Resilience & Connectivity Assumptions
Cloud reliability is limited by real-world connectivity. Make assumptions explicit: redundant ISP expectations, VPN/failover patterns, LAN readiness, and testing expectations.
Evidence examples: connectivity diagrams, failover test procedure, agency readiness checklist.
6) Change Management & Release Safety
Define how changes are reviewed, tested, rolled out, and rolled back. Mission-critical systems need safer deployment patterns than “move fast and break things.”
Evidence examples: change calendar, maintenance notifications, rollback runbooks, release notes policy.
7) Support Model & Escalation
Clarify how agencies reach a human during severe incidents, how escalation works, and what happens when the vendor is down too.
Evidence examples: escalation matrix, support SLAs by severity, war-room process.
8) Shared Responsibility Mapping
Publish a responsibility matrix: what the vendor owns, what the agency owns, and what is shared — including monitoring, connectivity, backups, and identity management.
Evidence examples: RACI chart, customer responsibilities, onboarding validation steps.
How Agencies Can Use These Standards
Before procurement
Use the standards as RFP language and acceptance criteria — not as “nice-to-haves.”
Before go-live
Require evidence: test results, runbooks, status transparency, and clear comms expectations.
During operations
Use recurring reviews to ensure standards stay true over time, not just during sales cycles.
During incidents
Lean on predefined severity, escalation, and communication timelines.