A manufacturing company in mid-Atlantic relies on Everbridge to keep over 17,000 employees safe during using Mass Notification. Mass Notification enables them to communicate with employees at risk during a critical weather event, ongoing health crisis, or security threat.
Critical events such as severe weather, civil unrest, and cyber-attacks, have not only become more frequent over the past several years, but they have altered the way many organizations operate on a day-to-day basis. In addition to those events, add in the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic and its clear these situations have the potential to directly affect the well-being of employees and operations, but is enough being done to mitigate or prevent their impact? While organizations cannot prevent critical events from occurring, they can be proactive with their decisions in order to reduce impact. With automated technology, organizations have a major asset toward identifying, responding to, and mitigating critical event damage, ensuring resilience amid a multitude of threats.
What does it mean to be resilient?
Resilience is defined as the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties. When a company is resilient, it not only affects their financial stability, but their perception in the eyes of customers and prospects, as well as the morale of team members who play a role in helping the company avoid downfalls. The top performing organizations are not just visionaries, they execute on resilience goals and strategies.
How often are critical events taking place? In IBM’s “Cost of a Data Breach Report 2022,” it was revealed that 83% of organizations have experienced at least one data breach. In addition, Forbes stated that in 2022, multiple records for extreme weather events were broken as climate change becomes more dramatic all over the world. With the unprecedented volume of critical events, it is vital for organizations to strengthen their resilience.
Digitalization would pay off quickly for most organizations. Due to the extensive capabilities of automated critical event management solutions, there is a high degree of unrealized potential to improve resilience across organizations of all industries.
How can organizations achieve resilience?
Organizations can strengthen their resilience by implementing an early warning system to identify hyper-relevant risks to specific people, assets, or facilities anywhere in the world and alerting the appropriate first responders. IBM also reported that it takes an average of 197 days to identify and 69 days to contain a cyber security breach, but companies that contain a breach in less than 30 days save over $1 million when compared to those who took longer.
Investing in a position such as a Chief Resilience Officer with a reasonable budget could be a great bridge between executives and the teams who are geared towards protecting employees and assets. Communicating the importance of security and resilience to board executives is a major step toward achieving improvement, especially by showing the impacts in terms of lost revenue or inability to generate revenue, as identified by the IBM study.
Investing in resilience drives success, and a recent report commissioned by Everbridge and Atos and authored by Dr. Stefan Vieweg, Director of the Institute for Compliance and Corporate Governance (ICC) at the Rheinische Fachhochschule in Cologne, Germany, revealed that only half of decision makers felt even moderately prepared to be resilient amidst such threats. From that reports comes the Everbridge eBook The Research Behind Resilience: Why Prioritizing and Investing in Resilience Matters, where you can read why prioritizing and investing in resilience matters for companies of all sizes, and what can happen when organizations don’t do so. The eBook provides detailed data on the seven key resilience findings from the report, and the six most common characteristics of Europe’s highest-performing organizations.
Investing in the right technology and automation can help to identify, respond to, and manage the effects of future critical events. Download our eBook The Research Behind Resilience: Why Prioritizing and Investing in Resilience Matters to learn more.
Although the benefits of deploying Critical Event Management (CEM) are becoming widely accepted, organizations can often struggle to demonstrate the tangible ROI to their key stakeholders, and can face an uphill battle when it comes to securing budget.
So, is it possible to put a value on Critical Event Management? To answer this question, Everbridge commissioned global market research firm, Forrester Consulting, to conduct an updated Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) Study, and examine the return on investment enterprises realized by deploying Everbridge’s CEM platform.
To understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed six representatives from four organizations with experience using CEM. For the purposes of the study, Forrester aggregated the interviewees’ experiences and combined the results into a single composite organization that is a global manufacturing firm with $16 billion in revenue and 30,000 employees. The purpose of the study is to provide organizations with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of CEM.
The 2023 study revealed five quantifiable benefits of Everbridge, and several others that while unquantifiable, provided benefit to organizations.
Reduced business interruptions led to $3 million in efficiency gains
For the composite organization, the use of Everbridge reduced the downtime caused by business interruptions, resulting in up to $3 million in efficiency gains over three years. With CEM, organizations can react faster to unplanned interruptions and outages, communicate with appropriate stakeholders faster, and overall decrease the impact of a critical event.
Reduced IT downtime saved up to $2 million
Not only does the Everbridge platform reduce the potential impact on business operations, but it also decreases the costs associated with IT downtime. The TEI study found that with Everbridge, organizations can save up to $2 million over three years. Increasingly complex IT environments require intelligent solutions that help identify and alert responders to outages as they happen. With improved workflows and automated processes, IT teams can quickly join forces to remediate incidents and reduce downtime.
Increased security team productivity gains $1.5 million
Before Everbridge, security teams overwhelmingly relied on manual and often time-consuming processes to identify and assess potential events. When using our CEM platform however, the same organization gained 24/7 support, and efficiencies in managing data sources and communicating with appropriate stakeholders.
Avoided inventory and property damage saved $1.1 million
Without proactive tools, organizations rely on manual processes to identify upcoming events that threaten inventory and property. However, with Everbridge, intuitive data sets and feeds ensure that organizations can know about threats early, send alerts to those who may be potentially impacted, and avoid avertable damage.
Recaptured employee productivity saved $800,000+
When events are imminent, there’s no time to spare when alerting employees and other internal stakeholders. Before Everbridge, organizations lost significant time trying to get in touch with the right people, at the right time. With our resilience platform however, employee productivity is recaptured, with faster response management and coordination, totaling $861,000 over three years.
The ROI of Everbridge CEM
Based on the analysis of customer feedback and quantified benefit, cost, risk, and flexibility factors, Forrester determined that through using Everbridge’s CEM platform, organizations reduced the time taken to identify and remedy critical events, getting revenue-generating activities back up to speed more quickly. Overall, the Forrester study determined that the three-year risk-adjusted benefit of the Everbridge platform amounted to a total of US$8.47M with an ROI figure of 358%.
Interested in reading the full study? Download the 2023 Total Economic Impact (TEI) of Everbridge Critical Event Management below!
Over 20 years ago, our founders envisioned how technology could be used to create a redundant, scalable, and resilient solution to quickly and reliably alert entire populations in the face of critical events. In that time, Everbridge has built a category-leading, unified critical event management platform trusted by more than 6,500 global organizations. According to a recent Forrester Consulting commissioned study, after investing in Everbridge’s CEM platform, interviewees’ organizations had “the capabilities and resources to effectively respond to and contain critical events, allowing them to better protect employees, company assets, and business processes.”
Since our beginnings, the Everbridge brand has stood for protecting our customers’ most valuable assets, their people. We are pleased to unveil our evolved Everbridge brand, renewing our mission to keep people safe and organizations running.
Our revised logo is an elegant and simple reflection of the resilience we provide to our customers, their rapid response to critical events, and most importantly the speed and upward strength of the recovery process. Our evolved brand is also a reflection of our desire to continue to serve you, our customer, with a modern comprehensive critical event management platform.
In an increasingly unpredictable world, resilient organizations minimize the impact events have on their people and operations. In the future we imagine a world where we empower our customers to absorb stress, return to productivity faster, and be more resilient.
We are grateful for your continued support and loyalty as we embark on this exciting new chapter for our company.
David Wagner,
President & Chief Executive Officer, Everbridge
With the growing concern over climate change, organizations are starting to take notice of the risks that come with it. Unfortunately, many organizations are still not fully aware of the consequences of ignoring these risks, which can lead to significant business disruption and financial losses. According to research conducted by Verdantix, “more than half of organizations have less than $1 million to respond to catastrophic events, and 41% of participants stated that they had no budget at all for catastrophic events” (Navigating Climate Threats and Proactive Mechanisms to Achieve Business Climate Resilience, November 2022). With climate change disasters on the rise, it is nearly inevitable that organizations will face a crisis at some point in the near future, and the time to begin preparing is now.
The current systems and solutions in place for managing climate hazards are often inadequate, and the reliance on traditional insurance has become insufficient. But there’s more to it than just the financial impact—organizations must take the necessary steps to become more resilient to the risks of climate change, keep their people safe, and position themselves to succeed in a dynamic market.
What is Climate Resilience?
Climate resilience refers to an organization’s ability to anticipate, prepare for, and adapt to the impacts of climate change while maintaining essential functions and keeping people and assets safe. It requires strategies, actions, and technology that enable organizations to manage and reduce climate-related risks and seize opportunities to build a more sustainable and resilient future.
The Insufficiency of Traditional Insurance
Organizations often rely on insurance providers to provide protection against the impacts of extreme weather events. However, traditional insurance models are becoming less reliable due to the unpredictability of such events. There are often significant delays in the dispersal of funds from insurance companies, or sometimes they do not cover the claim at all. The report found that “over two-thirds of organizations had a loss caused by an extreme weather event in the two last years, with most submitting an insurance claim for these events” (Navigating Climate Threats and Proactive Mechanisms to Achieve Business Climate Resilience, November 2022). These delays or denials of funds can leave organizations unable to react and adapt quickly, leading to business disruption and financial losses.
Increasing External Pressure
Soon, if they haven’t already, organizations will face significant external pressure in the form of new sustainability regulations. In fact, “74% of participants in the [Verdantix] study highlighted regulatory pressure as a key factor influencing climate risk management budgets” (Navigating Climate Threats and Proactive Mechanisms to Achieve Business Climate Resilience, November 2022). This will require organizations to evaluate their exposure to climate hazards, which means that organizations must take the necessary steps to develop adaptive strategies for risk reduction when dealing with climate hazards due to global warming, ultimately increasing their resilience. Failing to do so will result in further costs and consequences down the line.
Invest in the Future, Not Just the Present
Many organizations focus on short-term costs, ignoring the long-term benefits of investing in resilience. It is concerning that “most firms are not planning to invest in critical climate change risk management solutions” (Navigating Climate Threats and Proactive Mechanisms to Achieve Business Climate Resilience, November 2022). This lack of preparedness can lead to significant costs later on. By investing in an adaptive resilience solution now, organizations can save potentially millions down the line.
An Adaptive Resilience Solution: How to Improve Climate Resilience
To build resilience in the face of climate change, organizations need to take a proactive approach. Some tangible steps they can take are:
- Implementing adaptation measures, such as reviewing and updating business continuity plans and identifying potential supply chain disruptions.
- Exploring alternative finance options, such as parametric insurance.
- Reviewing and updating risk management processes to ensure they are inclusive of climate change risks.
- Investing in new technologies and solutions that can help better predict and respond to extreme weather events.
Often, even at a corporate level, organizations attempting to deal with a critical climate event do not have an effective or efficient way to manage the resources required to achieve resilience. Obstacles like overlapping and disconnected tools, data streams, interfaces, and teams can slow an organization’s response to a crawl when every minute counts. Siloed solutions complicate processes, causing confusion when teams and command centers should be working in sync. As a result, a fully integrated and holistic approach to critical event management is crucial to unlocking climate resilience and business continuity when faced with climate hazards.
With the right solutions in place such as Everbridge’s Critical Event Management (CEM) platform, organizations can minimize the impact of climate-related disruptions, recover more quickly and with less damage, and maintain their ability to operate and grow in a changing climate. According to the 2021 study published by Forrester, which analyzed the data from 11 customers using Everbridge’s CEM (Critical Event Management) Platform, over a 3-year period these organizations had an average ROI of 354% (The Total Economic Impact of Everbridge CEM Platform, March 2021). Investing in such technology will ultimately help organizations remain competitive in an ever-changing economic and environmental landscape.
An integrated CEM platform offers a holistic severe weather solution to groups charged with natural disaster management. When teams and command centers operate from a centralized platform, responses are rapid and coordinated. CEM software, for example, can send alerts that afford first responders and critical event managers precious time to assess the risks, as well as identify and locate endangered team members and assets.
A unified emergency software platform can also automate action plans, SOPs, and communications, such as sending public safety notifications, so that teams have the information and data they need to act quickly. After, analytics pinpoint where and when bottlenecks delayed responses, as well as where changes can improve processes.
To learn more about the importance of resilience and how your organization can become more adaptive to the risks of climate change, download the full report here.
Everbridge’s travel risk management solutions help keep travelers safe and organizations extend their duty of care. With Travel Protector, organizations can identify relevant threats, warn those affected and prescribe action. At any time, a comprehensive travel assistance service team, Everbridge Assist, is a call away, ready to help with any event that could impact the health, safety or wellbeing of a corporate traveler.