AtHoc wins patent for innovative MNS

SAN MATEO, Calif.—AtHoc, a leader in network-centric interactive crisis communication systems, announced in late July that it has been awarded a patent centered on the use of mobile alerting and safeguarding information security throughout the alerting cycle. The patent, formally titled “Mobile Alerting System Using Distributed Notification Delivery,” was filed in November 2010, according to a company news release. AtHoc customers have been using this invention to advance their preparedness, response and resumption during emergency situations since 2011, the company said.

The patent was awarded to the inventors, AtHoc's CEO Guy Miasnik and CTO Aviv Siegel.

With the technology, Miasnik and Siegel created high system resiliency for emergency communications in times of crisis, the release said. For the first time, organizations were given the ability to securely issue alerts from a mobile device in the event of internal network failure while safeguarding personally identifiable information behind their firewall, according to the release.

By synchronizing the information on the servers housed onsite to secure mobile devices and transiently transmitting it in an encrypted manner to distributed delivery systems, alerts can be initiated in the event of a crisis in a secure manner from anywhere, and personnel can be contacted regardless of the network they are using. Until Miasnik and Siegel's invention, organizations had only two suboptimal options - either house the information onsite and conduct the communications process via the internal network, or store the information offsite using a third-party's external system for communications, according to the release. This first compromised their ability to communicate during a catastrophic failure and the latter exposed sensitive data beyond their control, the release said.