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Five cases where receiving the right care, at the right time, made all the difference. Everbridge Assist, powered by Anvil.
Everbridge Assist, powered by Anvil supporting clients caught up in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Providing comprehensive analysis, consultancy and evacuations.
Businesses and communities are experiencing a growing number of disruptions from threats like severe weather, civil unrest, theft and vandalism, pandemics, and cyber-attacks. These disruptions have left many organisations concerned about the safety of their people and operations. As our world becomes increasingly uncertain, to succeed, organisations need to build resilience so that they can anticipate and avoid threats, respond effectively when necessary, and learn from their experiences to improve their next response.
Uncertainty is the New Normal
According to the IMF’s World Uncertainty Index, “…global uncertainty has increased significantly since 2012. Looking back at the past 60 years, we see few episodes in which uncertainty has been at levels close to those observed in the past decade.”
Uncertainty impacts business confidence. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2022, 85% of the global leaders and experts surveyed are worried or concerned. In the 2022 Allianz Risk Barometer, cyber-attacks, business interruptions, and natural disasters are the key issues for organisations.
Organisations are right to be concerned about cyber-crimes. A Software Advice survey found that 62% of UK-based small and medium sized companies experienced an increase in cyber threats in 2020 and 2021. These threats have a very real economic impact. McAfee estimates that global cyber-crime losses will exceed £1 trillion in 2022, a 50% increase over 2018.
According to PwC’s Global Crisis Survey 2021 resilience is defined as “the ability to bounce back from disruption. But it’s also about being prepared to enable and secure new possibilities”. PwC further argues that organisational resilience is critical — not just to succeed, but to survive.
Yet, Organizations Remain Unprepared…
Despite increasing disruptions, many companies are not investing in building resilience. To learn more, Everbridge, PwC and Atos Unify, a global leader in communication and collaboration services and solutions, partnered together to survey 200 European global industry resilience leaders in July about how they prepared for critical events, made investments in building resilience, and what the impact was when an event did occur. The survey was conducted by Professor Stefan Vieweg, a business resilience expert who leads the Institute for Compliance and Corporate Governance at the Rheinische Fachhochschule in Germany.
In the survey, most respondents reported spending less than 25% of their time building their organisation’s resilience. Many decision makers were uncertain about how to effectively implement resilience programs and platforms or were unaware of what tools were available. They also had difficulty calculating ROI or correlating the investment in resilience processes and technology to saving lives, mitigating costs, and averting impact to brand and reputation so they could gain C-suite support for the investment required.
Senior leaders across several European industries were interviewed to better understand what challenges they faced in building resilience. One leader reflected on the importance of senior management making resilience a priority.
“You need to address this from the top management so that you have the help of this authority to prioritise [resilience].”
– IT Risk Domain Expert, Leading French Commodity Firm.
Another recognized the difficulty in securing funding.
“The thing we struggle with is we’re so reactive, and our CEO doesn’t like to spend money. We’ve talked about CEM but getting the budget for it is the absolute challenge.”
– HR Decision Maker, UK Technology Company
Even when companies are confident that they are prepared for unforeseen risks, without the right tools and processes, their response may be ineffective. In the survey, almost half of the respondents felt at least moderately prepared to deal with threats. Despite this relatively high level of confidence, respondents reported only being able to avert about 25% of the potential damage of the last two events they had responded to, resulting in a negative financial impact of over 50% of annual sales, likely impacted by COVID-related losses, and, for 67% of the people surveyed, weeks and months of continued business disruption.
Critical Event Management (CEM) Builds Resilience and Success
According to Atos Unify: “building resilience is vital to surviving and thriving during times of change. Building People Resiliency is a key priority in as part of the Duty of Care for any organisation. Engaging employees becomes a key success factor to their safety and their overall performance. Resilience of physical and digital infrastructure will make the difference when it comes to delivering the service and value expected by consumers or citizens.”
The right critical event platform is a key component of building resilience. Critical event management platforms use technology to automate manual processes and bring together different ad hoc data feeds so companies can act quickly and decisively to assess risks and prevent harm to their people and operations. The Everbridge CEM platform brings innovative business intelligence, communications, and crisis management together to help organisations anticipate risks and respond to critical events. When a serious incident does occur, the Everbridge platform helps companies to recover quickly, learn and adapt as necessary, and continue to succeed.
The Everbridge platform reduces uncertainty and increases control. In a survey among Everbridge’s Best in Resilience™ certified organizations, 86% felt confident that they could identify the potential impact of a threat and 95% could contact their impacted employees in less than fifteen minutes.
The Everbridge platform is a smart investment with a demonstrated ROI. According to a Forrester study of Everbridge customers, the Everbridge CEM platform paid for itself in less than three months. Forrester also reported that “after investing in Everbridge’s platform, customers found they were able to respond to and contain critical events more quickly and effectively.”
And resilience doesn’t just help prepare companies to anticipate and deal with risks. A strong CEM platform like Everbridge’s helps organisations to make better strategic decisions and increase profitability by uncovering expense efficiencies, improving operations, and applying consistent practices across the organisation. One global Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company said “CEM has improved our efficiency by leaps and bounds. It’s transformed how we operate.” It can also help to unlock opportunities that may come from successfully responding to a threat.
Organisations can confidently build resilience with Everbridge’s innovative business intelligence, communications, and crisis management solutions. And for end-to-end, robust resilience solutions, Everbridge works collaboratively with partners like PwC and Atos. To better understand their current level of resilience, companies rely on PwC’s consulting services to identify gaps and opportunities to further enhance their resilience maturity. With Atos Unify’s CEM enabled end-to-end mission-critical and vertical solutions and the Everbridge CEM platform, companies can automate digital workflows and visualize important information in one central location for quicker response times.
By providing the tools for organisations to anticipate risks and effectively respond, Everbridge, PwC, and Atos Unify are partners for continued success in the face of any disruption.
How Can We Help You Build Your Company’s Resilience?
Learn more at our upcoming Resilience Roadshow across Europe.
