How About other Technology Problems???

How does the organization address concern such as the type and size of bandwidth and the capability of implementing web 2.0 tools?

The American Red Cross has been around for many years, and with that it has had the capability of  keeping up with the latest and greatest in technology. Let's take their websites for example (www.redcross.org/) they update it on a regular basis and has web 2.0 tools such as Twitter, Flicr, YouTube, Facebook, and email communications. The Twitter account gives the public live updates on events, donation needs for various disasters, and seminars. The latest addition they made was the Smartphones applications, they introduced it which live up to the moment news, seminars, and a donations tab.
Presently the American Red Cross uses Exede Enterprise satellite services from ViaSat Inc for their bandwidth, it provides them a high capacity Ka-band satellite that has speed up to 15 Mbps using a

transformational high-capacity satellite system (ViaSat.com, 2013). With all of this speed it can allow disaster response at very fast pace, especially with disaster, they need up to minute information on where the need is a higher demand. The Red Cross units dispatched to a disaster can respond to the main headquarters and they will receive information on a real time basis.

“Reliable satellite communication is a vital part of getting help to the public during emergencies.” said Keith Robertory, American Red Cross Disaster Response Emergency Communications manager. “That’s why we are bringing ViaSat on board as a partner in our disaster response efforts (ViaSat.com, 2013).”  All of these things are very important to the Red Cross in times of disaster.  They must be constantly updated and improved as needed. 

A recent challenge that the Red Cross (the British division) had to manage was the infrastructure of their complex backup system was starting to fail and become a nuissance problem. In the past they used a Windows backup system through an EMC NetWorker company in the past but that system was starting to fail and a new solution needed to be done. From the remote server to the main hub the backup was failing like a domino effect. The Red Cross had to fix it by doing a major upgrade to their system including recovering files from previous disaster to future projects. It was a modernization approach or in other words a complete technology overhaul. They replace or upgraded the system with Novell NetWare/OES and GroupWise, as well as Windows, SUSE and Red Hat Linux (BackTechnology.com, 2013).



Reference:

BackupTechnology.com. (2013). Backup Technology-Protecting British Red Cross's Data. Retrieved from: https://www.backup-technology.com/clients/british-red-cross/

ViaSat.com. (2013). Red Cross Chooses by ViaSat Enterprise service for Disaster Response. Retrieved from: http://www.viasat.com/news/red-cross-chooses-exede-viasat-enterprise-service-for-disaster-response