The value of business continuity as part of your end-to-end critical event management strategy

In today’s volatile business environment, organizations face a mountain of unpredictable challenges—from natural disasters to cyber-attacks, supply chain disruptions to IT outages—that can impact the safety of employees, operational uptime, or customer satisfaction and loyalty. The ability to navigate these critical events hinges on one key factor: resilience. Here, we explore why business continuity is essential to your end-to-end critical event management strategy and how comprehensive planning and preparedness can redefine organizational resilience.

Why business continuity is vital today

Effective business continuity solutions are no longer optional; they are critical. The landscape we operate in is fraught with unpredictability. The frequency and severity of disruptions have escalated, making robust preparation and rapid response mechanisms a necessity. Furthermore, regulatory compliance demands have tightened, with many industries now subject to stringent regulations that require detailed continuity and disaster recovery plans.

Customer trust and loyalty also hinge on the reliability of an organization’s continuity plans. During crises, the ability to maintain service delivery can make the difference between retaining and losing valuable customers. From a financial perspective, minimizing downtime and ensuring that operations continue smoothly during disruptions can stave off significant financial losses, preserving your organization’s stability and reputation.

The comprehensive approach of an end-to-end solution

Organizational resilience requires a robust end-to-end critical event management strategy that incorporates business continuity. The lifecycle of managing a critical event is built on five foundational pillars: Plan, Monitor, Alert, Respond, and Improve. These pillars ensure that organizations are not only prepared for any event but can also respond effectively, recover swiftly, and continuously enhance their resilience strategies.

The Everbridge platform

The key capabilities of an effective business continuity solution include the ability to develop detailed, tailored plans that address specific organizational needs. Conducting thorough business impact analyses is crucial for identifying and prioritizing critical business processes and resources. Equally important is fostering enterprise-wide collaboration, enabling teams to work together seamlessly across the organization.

Regular testing and refinement of continuity plans are essential to ensure their effectiveness. Meeting industry-specific compliance requirements effortlessly is another critical capability, allowing organizations to navigate regulatory landscapes with confidence.

The value of a comprehensive solution

An all-in-one end-to-end platform is designed to ensure that organizations can anticipate, mitigate, respond to, and recover from critical events. Such a platform integrates business continuity planning with critical event management, creating a cohesive and unified approach. Enhanced communication capabilities accelerate the dissemination of critical information and facilitate collaboration across the enterprise, significantly reducing response times during crises.

Streamlined onboarding processes enable new users to quickly and fully leverage the platform’s capabilities, ensuring that the organization can benefit from the solution’s full potential from the outset. Minimizing communication errors during crises enhances the accuracy and reliability of information, which is crucial for effective incident management.

Continuous improvement is a fundamental aspect of a comprehensive solution. By using real-time data and feedback, organizations can refine and enhance their response strategies, ensuring that they are always prepared for the next challenge

Conclusion

In the face of today’s complex threat landscape, having business continuity as part of your end-to-end enterprise resilience strategy is not just beneficial—it’s essential. A comprehensive end-to-end solution provides the resilience organizations need to stay prepared and responsive. By effectively planning, anticipating, and responding to critical events, organizations can not only survive disruptions but emerge stronger.

Achieve total enterprise resilience with a robust business continuity solution—keeping your people safe and your operations running, no matter what challenges arise.

Threats and disruptions of all types are increasing, a higher frequency equates to a bigger impact on populations and businesses

Leverage Everbridge solutions to operationalize your response to some of the points described in upcoming EU regulations including NIS2, DORA, and the Cyber Resilience Act. Enhance your compliance and strengthen your cyber defenses. 

In an increasingly interconnected world, the importance of robust cybersecurity measures cannot be overstated. The European Union (EU) has introduced several regulations aimed at enhancing cybersecurity across member states. These EU directives and regulations include the Directive on Measures for a High Common Level of Cybersecurity Across the Union (NIS2), the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), and the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). 

This blog will explore how Everbridge solutions can help cyber security, risk, and compliance teams navigate these regulations to enhance their organization’s cybersecurity posture from an operational perspective. 

NIS2

The NIS2 Directive (Directive (EU) 2022/2555) aims to achieve a high common level of cybersecurity across the EU. The regulation took effect on 16 January 2023, and Member States have until 17 October 2024 to codify its measures into national law. It requires Member States to adopt national cybersecurity strategies and designate competent authorities, cyber crisis management authorities, and computer security incident response teams. It also imposes stricter security requirements, including security incident reporting and cooperation between member states. Consequently, companies operating in these sectors will have to strengthen their data protection measures and their incident response capabilities, under penalty of severe financial sanction. 

DORA

The Digital Operational Resilience Act (Regulation (EU) 2022/2554) solves an important problem in the EU financial regulation. Before DORA, financial institutions managed the main categories of operational risk mainly with the allocation of capital, but they did not manage all components of operational resilience.  With DORA, financial organizations are now mandated to ensure the resilience, continuity, and availability of their information and communication technology (ICT) systems while upholding stringent data security standards. 

CRA 

The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) aims to safeguard consumers and businesses buying or using products or software with a digital component. It introduces mandatory cybersecurity requirements for manufacturers and retailers of such products. This regulation covers products that include digital elements enabling the transmission of data to a device or network. It also aims to promote trust in digital technologies by ensuring that they meet rigorous security standards. Manufacturers will therefore have to ensure that connected objects placed in the market comply with strict obligations such as a 24-hour notification window for any detected vulnerabilities.  

Main challenges to concrete applications  

NIS 2, CRA, and DORA regulations require significant effort in mapping dependencies, documentation, and planning. However, they do not explicitly address how to operationalize their plans to be able to withstand, respond to, and recover from business-impacting events. This represents a real challenge to companies, given the enhanced complexity and interdependency that these regulations cover.  

Common organizational challenge in digital operations and cyber security

Many organizations have very siloed teams and tech stacks, which means collaboration during a business-impacting event can be very difficult; companies need tech that provides “information bridges” between the different business units. Without a technology solution that allows automated connection between monitoring, activation, collaboration, orchestration, and response, organizations will struggle.  

How Everbridge supports companies to operationalize their compliance: automate and digitize preparedness, communications & response, and reporting 

Everbridge provides a single hub for incident preparedness, risk monitoring, crisis management, and service reliability. In other words, through the Everbridge platform, companies will be able to adequately operationalize three key aspects: Preparedness, communication & response, and reporting. The Everbridge solutions are designed to proactively identify, assess, and monitor risk, respond instantly and accurately to every incident, safeguard digital and physical assets, and keep people safe and productive. 

CEM resilience in action for emergency response

Preparedness – The Everbridge platform allows for the integration of all applicable systems to enable clear visibility across software applications and physical locations, giving a clear outline of what is important and why, and enabling faster decision-making and automation. Crucially, this step helps to identify key stakeholders and assets, which is one of the most important elements in responding to an event. Having data sets readily available and usable can improve response time and trigger workflows automatically rather than through manual intervention.

AI-powered information management with xMatters 

Communications & response – Following the identification of the event and its impact, the Everbridge platform supports the orchestration of the response. This involves identifying any automation processes that can be initiated, aligning the response with the relevant Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) and ensuring tasks are assigned to the right people at the right time through “out of band” communications that are not dependent on infrastructure.  By automating this process, Everbridge can slash response time down to minutes or seconds. Additionally, the Everbridge platform can be used to communicate with regulators as necessary, keeping relevant stakeholders updated, and visualize the status while providing estimates based on previous experience, which is particularly critical if the issue affects email. 

Incident response – time to restore

Reporting – The Everbridge platform allows organizations to develop self-assessment and learning capabilities for future preparation and response. During the event, all communications are captured, including but not limited to who received a communication, who responded, what the response was, and time of response. Also captured is whether there was no response at all. The same is also applicable for task allocation and completion for real-time monitoring during the event. Full audit logs are also recorded and exported for review/inclusion post-event. Within the simulation, situation reports can be generated when required and “After Action Reports” can be made available for review. All information is captured within the system to be utilized as required in After Action Reviews. 

Dedicated solutions such as the Everbridge suite of products can play a critical role in helping organizations operationalize EU directives and regulations such as NIS2, DORA, and the CRA. By leveraging the Everbridge platform, cybersecurity and incident management teams enhance their cybersecurity posture and reinforce their compliance to these regulations through operational resilience. Everbridge enables teams to digitize response plans and connect them to monitoring and communications solutions. The platform enables automation, streamlines processes, enhances visibility, and empowers organizations to concretely demonstrate compliance by strengthening digital resilience. 

By Lorenzo Marchetti, Head of Global Public Affairs

In an interconnected world, digital resilience is crucial for navigating crises and safeguarding financial and security assets. The European Union (EU), comprising 27 countries and 450 million people, recognizes the significance of digital resilience and has introduced regulatory mandates to fortify and align the digital ecosystem. The latest addition to this landscape is the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), alongside NIS2 and the Critical Entities Resilience Directive (CER), all effective since January 2023. This article explores the role of technology in responding to the DORA regulation and the opportunities it presents for organizations.

What is DORA?

The Digital Operational Resilience Act (Regulation (EU) 2022/2554) solves an important problem in the EU financial regulation. Before DORA, financial institutions managed the main categories of operational risk mainly with the allocation of capital, but they did not manage all components of operational resilience.  With DORA, there is a significant change for the financial sector because organizations are now mandated to ensure the resilience, continuity, and availability of their information and communication technology (ICT) systems while upholding stringent data security standards. Aligned with existing regulations like NIS2 in the EU and the Bank of England Operational Resilience Regulation in the United Kingdom, DORA offers organizations the chance to leverage existing capabilities to meet the new requirements effectively. This regulatory framework lays the foundation for an efficient and agile risk management framework, compelling organizations to enhance their ICT risk management policies and procedures.

Compliance with DORA requires increased documentation to demonstrate adherence. Organizations must document their ICT and information assets, develop comprehensive encryption and cryptographic control policies, and establish protocols for network security management and data transfer protection. The Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS) further clarify DORA requirements. Organizations must conduct gap analyses to identify documentation gaps and validate processes and controls. Establishing governance processes to support these policies and ensuring long-term maintenance are crucial steps in achieving compliance.

The different components to Operationalize DORA: the role of Everbridge critical event management (CEM)

Although DORA offers a simplified ICT risk management framework for some organizations, governance, risk mitigation, ICT business continuity management, and reporting remain essential even within this simplified model. Implementing and maintaining this framework presents challenges, particularly for organizations with less formalized processes. It is crucial for organizations to assess their business strategies and identify applicable requirements for compliance.

Technology plays a pivotal role in enabling organizations to respond effectively to DORA compliance. Advanced software solutions, such as those offered by Everbridge, provide comprehensive support in meeting physical security, ICT security, and change management demands. They enable automation, streamline processes, and enhance visibility, empowering organizations to demonstrate compliance and strengthen digital resilience.

Operationalize DORA: Physical security

Physical security is crucial for overall digital resilience. Organizations must safeguard physical assets such as secure premises, data centers, and hardware equipment. Technology solutions can strengthen physical security measures by providing robust access control systems, surveillance systems, and incident management capabilities. These solutions enable organizations to monitor and manage physical access, detect and respond to security breaches in real-time, and ensure compliance with physical security policies.

Everbridge Smart Security allows organizations to centralize their physical security through Physical Security Information Management (PSIM) technologies, avoiding the costs of replacing physical devices. It facilitates the automation of standard operating procedures and response plans, as well as communicating with key stakeholders.

Operationalize DORA: Respond to business and people impacting events

Furthermore, as hybrid working trends continue, ensuring consistent protection for employees working from various locations becomes critical. Everbridge CEM for Business Operations and People Resilience provide organizations with the data repository and risk intelligence needed to identify potential risks and to communicate before, during, and after a crisis. These solutions will automate communications to impacted individuals, responders, and stakeholders, integrating with operationalized response plans.

Operationalize DORA: Digitizing operational resilience

ICT operations security includes capacity and performance management, data and systems security, vulnerability and patch management, and encryption and cryptographic controls. Technology solutions, like Everbridge CEM for Digital, address ICT operations security challenges. These solutions integrate with security monitoring and management systems, enabling organizations to identify vulnerabilities, monitor performance, and implement robust security controls. Automation and real-time alerts allow proactive detection and response to security incidents.

ICT change management involves managing changes to ICT systems, including project management, system development, acquisition and maintenance, and ICT change management requirements. Organizations must establish robust change management processes to minimize risks and ensure seamless operations.

Everbridge CEM for Digital offers an integrated approach to ICT risk management, facilitating collaboration, communication, and coordination among different teams. This technology solution integrates risk assessment, auto-remediation, incident management, and reporting capabilities, streamlining risk management processes and reducing the impact of events on the organization.

Complying with DORA presents many challenges. Technology solutions, like Everbridge CEM for Digital, streamline processes, automate tasks, and optimize resource utilization, offering cost-effective options for managing ICT risk and compliance requirements.

The way forward

Fostering a culture of resilience and risk management across the organization can be challenging. Technology solutions play a vital role in fostering this culture by providing intuitive interfaces, user-friendly workflows, and collaborative features. These solutions facilitate employee adoption and engagement, as well as centralized risk management processes.

While compliance with DORA may pose challenges, organizations can leverage the regulatory requirements as opportunities to drive innovation and gain a competitive edge. Advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning capabilities allow organizations to gain actionable insights, proactively mitigate risks, and demonstrate commitment to digital resilience.

Everbridge empowers organizations to simplify compliance efforts and build operational resilience. Organizations can respond to business and people impacting events with Everbridge software solutions and drive better outcomes. Everbridge CEM operationalizes preparedness, automated communications, and reporting. By leveraging technology, organizations can embrace EU mandates on digital resilience, strengthen their ability to prevent crises, and better navigate the complexities of regulations effectively.

To learn more, watch the insightful webinar hosted by Everbridge, as we delve into the challenges and strategies faced by financial institutions in implementing strategies and tactics to comply with the European Union (EU) Directive on Operational Resilience Act (DORA).  

Watch the on-demand webinar, Unlocking DORA, from Policy to Operationalization, or request a demo to understand how Everbridge can support organizations.