DICE transforms with NOC, complete disaster recovery center

BAY CITY, Mich.—DICE is upgrading its NOC and disaster recovery center, based here, putting in more network infrastructure to accommodate the influx of technology-back-up clients the company sees coming. The updated capabilities include “next generation technology” that evolves the central station automation platform provider beyond its roots, according to company founder and president Cliff Dice.

“If you think about our new generation disaster recovery center, it's not just automation software, it's a company's entire infrastructure: telephone switches, telephone lines, voice, data, everything can fail over to us now,” Dice said. “The failover happens automatically in a couple seconds—the central station doesn't even know they went down. And what we've done is begun monitoring all of our customers from our Network Operations Center, our NOC. All of our customers—thousands of various branch offices and central stations are tied to us and online at DICE … It's not really about automation platform software anymore… it's now about providing infrastructure back up.”

Melissa Courville, head of marketing at DICE pointed out the infrastructure back-up DICE offers isn't just for DICE customers.

“We can also provide these types of back-up services to someone who isn't on the DICE platform. It will work for someone who's using, say an MAS platform as well,” Courville said. “This is for anybody. It won't be as seamless a service as when they're getting the whole package from DICE, but they can still use us for back-up.”

Dice said his company could not only provide the entire infrastructure a central station needs to stay operational through a disaster or local systems failure, but could even be the primary technology infrastructure a company uses to conduct day-to-day business as usual.

“We back-up about six million central station accounts every night in that center. There's thousands of VPN connections back into branch offices and alarm companies. It's what we're doing,” Dice said. “There are alarm centers that don't have anything in their center other than bodies and PCs because everything's at DICE … You could start up an alarm company off of our services without any capital outlay … It's all about the cloud, the Google way of doing business.”

Dera DeRoche-Jolet, owner of Monroe, La.-based Alarm Monitoring Services, said the DICE disaster recovery center literally saved her company.

“In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the region that was home to our central station. Over one hundred AMS dealers, and over 10,000 monitored accounts [could have been affected],” DeRoche-Jolet said. “Using DICE's disaster recovery system, we received and handled every signal sent before, during, and after one of the most devastating storms in American history.”