Arkansas Electric Chooses OnPage for Cybersecurity Compliance

“OnPage solved a mandatory requirement we had in our data center for regulatory cybersecurity intrusion compliance. To cover physical or cyber intrusions, we have OnPage notifications sent out to the group on an on-call rotation for incident response.”

– Philip Huff, Director of IT Security Compliance

OnPage provides secure, high-priority notifications in case of cyber intrusions to meet new regulatory requirements.

OnPage Corporation (formerly Onset Technology), creator of OnPage® priority messaging, announced today that Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corporation, one of the nation’s largest generation and transmission cooperatives, has chosen OnPage to help meet its regulatory compliance requirements for cyber and physical security event notifications. By providing secure, critical alerts, with predefined escalation protocols, audit trails, receipt and read notifications, IT personnel are immediately notified of potential intrusions.

After evaluating two other competing products, the cooperative’s Director of IT Security and Compliance, Philip Huff, and his team chose OnPage for its ease of implementation, high efficiency and cost effectiveness.

“We are very pleased and honored to have Arkansas Electric entrust their compliance obligations and mission-critical messaging with OnPage,” said Judit Sharon, CEO of OnPage Corporation. “The IT messaging environment and its responsiveness to cyber intrusions and equipment failures is becoming more and more challenging every day. We are proud to be their software solution of choice.”

We spoke to Philip Huff recently to gather additional information about the challenges that he faces on a daily basis.

OnPage: How did you first find out about the product and introduce it to the team?

Philip explains: “We were searching for something on the app store that would work. We struggled for years to manage our on-call rotation efficiently and we had new regulation coming into effect that made this even more challenging.

Since almost everyone has a smartphone, we hoped that there had to be a better system available. After reviewing the OnPage system we selected the system … there was no wasted time with large evaluations and learning curves. You just turn it on and GO.”

OnPage: What requirements did OnPage solve for you?

Philip said: “OnPage solved a mandatory requirement we had in our data center for regulatory cybersecurity compliance. To cover physical or cyber intrusions, we have OnPage notifications sent out to the group on an on-call rotation for incident response.

We tried a couple of your competitors, including one that was specifically focused on the medical field. IT has specific needs that are very different. The medical app did not work for us and it was much less user friendly. We found OnPage easy to deploy. OnPage fit the niche that addressed our IT on-call support and IT operations messaging.”

OnPage: Can you tell us about a recent success story?

Philip said: “It’s all about efficiency. Since we use OnPage every day, we’re reducing staff time by eliminating the need to maintain on-call lists and we have improved our response time to resolve issues.

If there’s an intrusion in our facilities or a door alarm trips after hours, the previous system would ring a security company and they would dispatch our team. Now, our manager simply sends an email and the security team is immediately paged. We are able to save money by cancelling our ring down services for physical security intrusions.

The scheduling function is great, too. We have four different departments with several on-call rotation groups. In the past, we had to manually maintain a list of individuals that were on call. With OnPage, we have saved time and realized major cost savings by eliminating the need to maintain spreadsheets with our answering service.

Your product was the perfect solution for us. It made our job easier and it works great!”