The tournament started on May 13 in Tampere and Helsinki and ended on Sunday, May 29. The Ice Hockey World Championships brought many people to the venues in these cities and set high requirements for event security.
Insta supported event security at the tournament in Tampere as part of the SURE project, which uses the Insta Blue Aware situational awareness solution to combine data, image and video sources and present a shared map-based situational picture on a web browser. Insta’s situational awareness solution is the technological backbone of the SURE concept.
At the Ice Hockey World Championships at the Nokia Arena, the event security operator used Insta Blue Aware (IBA) and the related Insta Blue Tracker (IBT) mobile application. The security operator, other security organizations and the authorities contributed to event security at the tournament. The management system, which combines a situational awareness solution with a mobile application, was used as a common messaging channel to share real-time situational information between teams in the event area and the situational center.
“We had some reservations about using IBA and IBT, but we soon began to understand their idea and functionalities. At first, we were suspicious of the effectiveness of cooperation with the authorities on this platform, but cooperation with all parties ran smoothly once we had become more familiar with the solution,” says Ville Ketonen, CEO of Local Crew Security.
The security operator’s situational center used Insta Blue Aware with the authorities, and the security units and first-aid units in the event area used Insta Blue Tracker. These applications enable the various parties to use images, videos and texts for communication and share real-time situational pictures of the operators and tasks in the field. For example, the security officers in the field can take pictures of issues such as broken items, view each other’s location in real time and send location information about incidents in real time within a common system. This also makes the activities, planning and coordination of groups in the field easier. Above all, it improves the security of the event.
“This application is beneficial for event security, especially from the perspective of improving the security level of public events,” says Ketonen.
Started in 2019, the SURE project is the only project in Finland to have been granted funding from the EU’s Urban Innovative Actions program. The project seeks to improve the security of residents and visitors in Tampere by developing intelligent security solutions related to urban environments.
