To meet the growing needs of their local communities, many municipalities have chosen to make significant investments to deploy and maintain their own fiber optic networks for communications related to a number of important areas:
1. Emergency services (police, fire department)
2. Political facilities
3. Educational facilities
4. Health care facilities
5. Transportation and traffic cameras
6. Utilities
7. Enterprise
Each of these entities plays an important role in helping communities thrive from a growth, health and/or safety perspective. In general, all data is sensitive to some extent, but for communications like emergency services it is absolutely critical, and protecting data while maintaining overall performance is a major challenge for every municipality.
While hardware and data come to mind when thinking about maintaining an advanced fiber network, it's equally important to consider the physical infrastructure upon which all components are connected. Usually, when a problem occurs, it is due to a faulty fiber, a break, a splicing, etc. In addition, malicious intrusion incidents related to data theft of critical services and power supplies are on the rise. When it comes to grid information, the federal government requires certain municipal entities to provide a higher level of data protection in the form of fiber-optic surveillance systems or data encryption.
Traditionally, data encryption and fiber-optic surveillance systems have been prohibitively expensive for municipalities, which often deal with substantial budget constraints. While encryption is ultimately the best way to prevent potential data theft, it is very expensive and does not solve the most common physical problems such as fiber breaks, performance degradation, etc. Likewise, while a fiber optic monitoring system cannot protect the data itself like encryption does, it proactively monitors and alerts operators in real-time about problems (whether failures or intrusions) while minimizing service downtime by identifying incidents in the cable in the location.
While fiber optic surveillance systems currently on the market still typically require significant up-front investment, some vendors are starting to offer more cost-effective and scalable solutions, resulting in a better value proposition for municipalities. They can now more easily deploy solutions to help them monitor from an integrity perspective, while ensuring a higher level of all-around network performance than without a solution or waiting a long time to accumulate a large budget.
Municipalities need to consider many factors when determining the best way to protect their local fiber network. If this method of encryption is planned, there are many types of encryption solutions, as well as several different types of fiber optic surveillance systems. Ultimately, municipalities must decide what best suits their unique network and monitoring needs.
