Sure, you have detailed emergency preparedness programs and your business continuity planning is up-to-date, but with an increasingly complex and unpredictable threat environment, it has never been more imperative to act faster. With more complete intelligence, you’ll be able to increase your speed and decisiveness in order to assess risks and prevent them from harming your people or disrupting your operations.
A Critical Event Management platform uses technology to take manual processes and automate them. Amplifying ad hoc data feeds to provide richer intelligence and correlating threats with locations of assets and people, ensures more rapid and comprehensive incident assessment and remediation.
Additional benefits include:
A critical event is a disruptive incident which poses serious risk or threat to assets or people. An effective Critical Event Management program and strategy is an integrated, end-to-end process that enables organizations to significantly speed up responses to critical events and improve outcomes by mitigating or eliminating the impact of a threat. Imagine your business continuity, disaster recovery, active assailant, emergency response, natural disaster, IT incident risk management, and mass notification all rolled up into an easy-to-execute, strategic plan with long-term benefits.
The four components of CEM include:
Proactively assess potential threats before they become critical events. With the right built-in risk intelligence and data feeds, supported by 24/7 analysts, your organization can leverage thousands of sources of data across weather, protest, social media, dark web, and hyper-local safety feeds to curate, filter and categorize risk events. This ensures a faster response to threats in order to avoid false positives and make better decisions. Align risk events to assets using a dynamic correlation engine that combines static location, expected location and last known location of people and assets. CEM can take this a step further by considering time elements to determine who or what is impacted by threats, in order to reach them faster and more decisively. Automated workflows ensure that even when you and your team are not watching for threats, the system is doing it for you. SOPs, communications, and action plans can be automated and orchestrated during a crisis in order to speed up response and ensure that the appropriate action is taken for a particular threat. With CEM, metrics are built-in throughout the process to ensure the right action is taken by the right people, at the right time, and to understand how effective actions were and how you can do better in the future.
INTELLIGENCE
CORRELATION
ORCHESTRATION
ANALYTICS
To execute a CEM strategy, the following steps must be addressed:
Critical events can impact different areas of the business, and often impact more than one. Build alliances across the chief security officer (CSO), chief information security officer (CISO), and chief information officer (CIO) at the very least. Combining the experience, insights, and intelligence from across the organization makes it possible to quickly understand the root cause of an event and ensure a rapid response and operational continuity. It’s time to pull all of your risk information together into one place to streamline your threat assessment process. Align sources, information, and evaluate the risks and the impact to your organization across five key asset types: People, Buildings, IT Systems, Supply Chain and Brand/Reputation. Your data sources should be vetted and verified, involving geo-targeted intelligence related to weather, terrorism and other potential disruptions. Verified sources and analysis eliminate the noise and enable you to generate the most impactful information while eliminating false positives. During every event, a resilient organization will know where employees, travelers, visitors, offices, manufacturing facilities, and other critical assets are located. It’s also critical to know how they are interconnected and the dependencies between them. Beyond knowing the location and interdependencies, organizations also need an idea of how much it will cost if these assets are impacted by an event. For instance, perhaps a critical business application goes down resulting in a thousands of dollars in losses every minute. It’s important to calculate losses based on the overall use case, such as how many employees are going to be impacted. It is critical to determine what is critical and what isn’t. Answer the big question: What is the impact and exposure? An effective approach is to differentiate between threats and risks across the board and to then quantify risk based on the threat, the threat’s nature, the organization’s overall vulnerability or exposure, the overall impact, which may go beyond the immediate assets, people and consider the overall timeline, which is often dynamic. For instance, it’s not sufficient to ask, “How many employees are in HQ right now?” since employees are constantly on the move. Or perhaps a geopolitical issue or event is going to cause a disruption to the supply chain, but the organization won’t feel the impact for two months.
BUILD PARTNERSHIPS WITH LEADERSHIP
ASSESS YOUR SOURCES OF INFORMATION
IDENTIFY AND LOCATE CRITICAL ASSETS
QUANTIFY AND ANALYZE RISK
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