In today’s hyper-connected age, organizations find their employees distributed across the globe, tackling challenges and solving problems through a variety of innovative solutions. But this comes at a risk of security.
Every day, we hear news of ransomware attacks, hackers, natural disasters, and more. All of these are threats to data security and the smooth running of internal operations. Safeguarding against these threats as well as ensuring that the organization runs smoothly even during one of these events is critical. That’s why it’s important to have a critical event management solution for your organization before anything drastic happens.
But what is a critical event management solution? What does it do, and why should you invest your money into one?
What is a Critical Event Management Solution?
Critical Event Management Systems take manual processes within the organization and automate them while amplifying ad-hoc data to provide intelligence. These systems use this data to find correlations with locations of assets and people, enabling better identification of threats and methods to remedy them.
Critical Event Management Tools understand that data security is valuable and that unforeseen events can have huge impacts on smooth operations. These critical event management services are typically focused on ensuring data is protected, employees are able to safeguard data at regular intervals to prevent malicious attacks and natural disasters, communicate through safe channels during the event of one of these attacks, and finally, get operations back on track as soon as possible with little to no downtime.
Critical Events are Becoming Commonplace
Whether it’s a cyberattack, outage of IT services, unnatural weather events, public safety issues, or natural disasters, all of them can impact organizations and individuals to disrupt the normal work routine. But when vital company infrastructure is affected, the impact will be massive.
As much as we’d like to believe otherwise, critical events are not rare. As a decision-maker in your organization, you will need to plan to respond to these events before they even happen. This includes putting critical event management systems in place and ensuring that these critical management services are available during one of these negative events.
This includes preventing these events from happening in the first place to ensure that even when they do happen, the downtime, impact, and recovery time are reduced as much as possible.
Why Should You Use a Critical Event Management System?
CEM systems are designed to help you plan and act during a crisis, as well as recover from incidents as fast as possible. This type of rapid response management isn’t just good for smooth operations, it also improves employee confidence.
Another thing to note is that stakeholders and clients can also be inspired by your competent response to actually be always available even when there are drastic events happening internally. Critical event management tools provide organizations with the situational awareness to provide effective communication.
Here’s what a good critical event management platform should have.
- It should be able to take in data from a variety of sources, such as internal, physical security, IT, weather, and news, to prepare for these events.
- Decide on and invoke response protocols to notify appropriate response teams through secure communication channels to evaluate the danger of the situation and decide on the next steps going forward.
- Critical event management solutions should be able to verify the safety of your employees during disaster times and gather the necessary intelligence required to recover your operations as quickly as possible.
- Your critical event management services should be able to keep stakeholders informed and updated with the latest news throughout the lifecycle of the event.
- You should be able to issue the steps needed to move through the recovery phase safely and securely, with all of your internal team members.
Critical Events are Unavoidable Today
It’s not the doomsayer within ourselves talking, critical events are rapidly becoming a normal part of every organization’s operations. Whether they’re natural events such as floods and tornadoes, or cyber-attacks, critical events are becoming commonplace, regardless of where you are, what industry you’re in, and which clientele you cater to.
Today, businesses can expect to find themselves in multiple critical events throughout the year. This can result in millions of dollars of unexpected costs, disruptions in operation, and tangible threats to the workforce, customers, or suppliers.
This makes critical event management a mandatory aspect of organizational due diligence. You need to anticipate, manage, and mitigate disruptions to your internal operations, and use a solution that ensures that all relevant data is siloed properly, analyzed quickly and accurately, and finally communicated to all relevant stakeholders.
Although this can also be done manually, an automated solution can reduce the number of errors and provide a foundation and deliver responses that are both quick and effective.
Eg: Consider an automobile manufacturer based out of the US. Most automotive manufacturers rely on lean manufacturing, and as such, do not keep a large amount of parts inventory in the factory. So even minor supply chain disruptions can impact them negatively.
A natural disaster, such as a flood or hurricane, can disrupt their normal supply.
Using critical event management tools, the manufacturer can reroute supply through another route or temporarily stock up on inventory to a higher level than they normally do. These solutions can ensure their business operations aren’t impacted because of a natural disaster happening elsewhere in the world.
Conclusion
Critical event management systems have already become a mainstay in multitudes of companies. They’re working on ensuring that organizations around the world are prepared for any type of natural or technological events that could threaten their smooth operations.
If you’re still on the fence about choosing a critical event management system, then consider all of the events that have already happened in the world, with the most obvious being the recent pandemic.
Choosing a solution doesn’t have to be difficult either. Multiple vendors make it easy to not just select their services, but also educate you on what they can do, and what they can help you be prepared for.
