How Fusion Centers Help Protect California’s Critical Infrastructure

In an interview with Mike Dayton, acting secretary of the California Emergency Management Agency, Government Technology’s sister publication Emergency Management found out how California utilizes fusion centers and works with the private sector to protect critical infrastructure.

Question: How do the fusion centers factor in?

Dayton: Early on we embedded a critical infrastructure analyst in all our fusion centers — we have five in California. We put analysts in there to outreach with the critical infrastructure sectors and to monitor the threat stream coming in on critical infrastructure, so they’d be able to provide us a strategic assessment in the domains as well as statewide and say, “These are sectors that we think are highest at risk based on intelligence.” So then we can match that and the high-consequence targets. We are making our investments much more wisely because we are intelligence-led.


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Go to Emergency Management to read more of the interview with Dayton.