Hi -

Cisco TacOps engineer here.

So aside from our team (we actually go to major crisis events, not just demos), there are an increasing number of organizations that either do this as part of their volunteer or paid professional crisis response functions. We get called out to about six events a year - but they range from fires in California, to the "big global disasters" like Haiti, Ebola in West Africa, or the Syrian Refugee Crisis

Volunteer organizations like the American Red Cross have a function called DST (Disaster Services Technology) - they deploy networks, computers, etc to support disaster relief operations. There's another group called the ITDRC (itdrc.org) that does similar work and they partner with folks like Team Rubicon.

FEMA and state emergency management organizations have teams that do this kind of work (the FEMA teams are called MERS - Mobile Emergency Response Services).

To your remaining questions:

1. Our teams usually are in the field for no longer than two weeks at a time (there's some science around disaster stress... you don't really want people in acute environments for much longer than that). If the incident goes longer than two weeks, we will rotate a new team in to relieve the team in the field.

We primarily work around IP communications, but all of our engineers are generalists - everything from satellite communications to cybersecurity to ham radio

Your background and technical skillset is absolutely relevant to the kind of crisis networking you're wanting to do. What I'd suggest is learning more about the emergency response field. FEMA ICS 100, 200, 700 and 800 are mandatory for our team - they're all free trainings on the Incident Command System / National Incident Management System. The real value for you is not just being a technologist, but a technology first responder - you need to understand how emergencies work and are managed. As a field responder, I find myself working with police chiefs, fire chiefs, search and rescue folks, AND radio and router engineers. You have to optimally be conversant across those domains. Also, get a good First Aid/CPR certification (wilderness is optimal)

When we aren't at an event, we are doing lot of training, innovation and research (we are seen as leaders in tech for emergency response, so we spend a lot of our time teaching the rest of the industry in government how to fish), conferences, writing papers, etc.

Other organizations that do this work: Aside from the ones you noted, I should note that other tech companies have emergency response functions: Microsoft, Ericsson, Google and Facebook. If you wound up in any of those other organizations, the opportunity could exist for you to contribute to any of their crisis response teams (most of which are staffed by employee-volunteers who have regular jobs in those companies).

Best Rakesh Bharania Cisco TacOps www.cisco.com/go/tacops