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State of Florida Launches Connected Seaports Program with ARES

By Ken Briodagh

According to a recent announcement, the Florida Seaport Transportation and Economic Development Council (FSTED) has chosen ARES Security Corporation’s Common Operating Picture (COP) platform, CommandBridge, to unite the seaports in the state of Florida with state and local government agencies.

Florida has identified gaps within its information sharing process during natural disaster events. The FSTED Council has selected CommandBridge to fill these gaps by strengthening the level of maritime domain awareness, cyber resilience, and communications during natural and manmade events. The platform will include an integration with The Maritime and Port Security Information Sharing and Analysis Organization’s (MPS-ISAO) critical cybersecurity alerts. The MPS-ISAO’s Cybersecurity Service advances maritime cyber resilience through the sharing of cyber threat intelligence and coordinated response and the unified solution will be shared with up to 14 Florida ports as well as 10 other state and regional agencies to streamline communications and operations during regional or state-wide events in order to help responders make quick, informed decisions for improved responses.

“The FSTED Council is constantly looking for ways to strengthen the public/private partnership between ports and government agencies,” said Michael Rubin, VP, Governmental Affairs and Project Manager, Florida Ports Council. “CommandBridge and MPS-ISAO will provide Florida ports with the ability to share critical data with each other, first responders and state/local government which has been a vision for FSTED for many years. This ability to quickly collaborate will help the entire state's response efforts during regional or state-wide events and will also increase each ports' resilience”

CommandBridge is designed to leverage clients’ existing systems and sensors to form an intuitive COP that provides heightened situational awareness. Traditionally, these systems, sensors, and workflows would collect and store data individually, which creates silos of information. Instead, CommandBridge assimilates these information sources to provide context and help clients better understand the information they care about. This data is constantly processed by the CommandBridge rules engine to detect and alert to abnormal activity in security or operations. When CommandBridge detects any of the activity that clients have identified as important, the system fires an alert, visualizes the most relevant information to the user, and then enables users to interact with that data and quickly execute the appropriate response.


Ken Briodagh is a writer and editor with more than a decade of experience under his belt. He is in love with technology and if he had his druthers would beta test everything from shoe phones to flying cars.

Edited by Ken Briodagh
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