Evolution of Mass Notification into Critical Event Management Enabling operational resilience

Whitepaper

In order to get to this place, your ability to manage critical events must evolve alongside the trajectory of your organization. For example, you likely have a mass notification solution in place already. However, as your organization grows, a stand-alone mass notification solution is no longer enough to confidently tackle the escalated situations you will have to face, such as active shooter situations, terrorist attacks, severe weather conditions, IT outages, and cyber-attack incidents.

According to the 2020-21 MIM Annual report, 73% of respondents felt that their companies either did not invest or did not invest enough into Major Incident management. If you expand into another county, state, or even become a global presence, how will you be armed with the information and tools you need to respond when time is of the essence?

If you think into the future of your organization, mass notification is just the first step toward a complete critical event management, or CEM, strategy. Building a more holistic CEM strategy will ensure the safety of your people, the continuity of business operations, the reliability of consistent revenue, and resilience against future critical events.

What is Critical Event Management (CEM) vs. Mass Notification?

It is likely you have some form of an emergency preparedness program in place already, however organizations today are faced with an increasing number of critical events. For example, CrowdStrike found that intrusions threatening organizations’ cybersecurity across the globe grew 400 percent in 2019 and 2020 combined, and that is just one type of critical event. Being fully prepared for critical events not only keeps your people safe, it also helps to significantly reduce the financial impact an event has on your bottom line.

Building a more holistic CEM strategy will ensure the safety of your people, the continuity of business operations, the reliability of consistent revenue, and resilience against future critical events.

What if your organization could create a reality in which any critical event that may affect your people or your operations has already been anticipated? When it comes to thinking ahead about how your organization will manage a critical event, this reality is not a far-fetched ideal but an attainable goal.

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WhitepaperEvolution of Mass Notification into Critical Event Management

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Having a stand-alone emergency solution, such as mass notification, is often no longer enough to handle a critical event in the most effective and efficient way possible. This is where CEM comes in.

A Critical Event Management platform uses technology to take manual, paper-driven processes and digitally transform them. Benefits include:

• Consolidating information about risks to the organization in a common operating picture, enabling rapid risk detection and assessment

• Consolidating information about the organization’s assets into the same common operating picture, enabling detailed understanding of the risk

• The ability to automate the initiation of incident response activities

• Manage the incident lifecycle from beginning to the end of the incident

• Faster recovery of operations during or after the incident

• More complete assessment of your risk profile to move from a reactive crisis response approach to a proactive crisis prevention approach

• Accelerated analysis of your performance

Think of a CEM platform as the structure that houses all the information and technology you need under one roof in order to successfully manage any critical event that may affect your organization. Incorporating a complete CEM strategy is so much more than just having mass notification capability. It is a holistic approach to the way organizations can become more efficient by digitizing processes, while ensuring maximum resilience against both physical and digital threats.

Assess, Locate, Act, Analyze: A Holistic CEM Strategy

If your organization already has a mass notification solution in place, that is great! You understand the value in a solution that allows you to act more efficiently and effectively when a critical event takes place. This is a proactive step toward becoming a more resilient organization.

However, as mentioned above, it is important to understand that mass notification itself is just one component of a complete critical event management strategy.

A successful Critical Event Management strategy has four parts:

Assess the impact of a critical event using relevant real-time intelligence.

Locate your people and assets that might be in harm’s way using dynamic tracking technology.

Act consistently and appropriately with the help of automation.

Analyze how your organization managed the event, what you did well and what can be improved in future circumstances.

CEM

ASSESS 1.

LOCATE 2.

Context and Severity

Identify Stakeholders

and Assets

ACT 3.

Communicate, Engage, and Orchestrate

ANALYZE 4.

Performance

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WhitepaperEvolution of Mass Notification into Critical Event Management

ASSESS, LOCATE, ACT, ANALYZE: Where Does Mass Notification Fit Into Critical Event Management?

Assess: Context and Severity First, it is important to be aware of and assess a risk or an event that may impact your organization in a timely manner.

A mass notification system alone does not collect intelligence, nor automatically trigger set workflows depending on the unique situation at hand.

A complete CEM platform allows organizations to assess situations in real time with the most up-to- date and highly relevant information gathered from thousands of data points. Additionally, predetermined automation allows the system to assess the situation for you while keeping any stakeholders abreast of the situation.

Locate: Identify People and Assets at Risk

Once you understand that a risk will likely have an impact on your organization, it is important to locate and identify the specific people, facilities, and business services at risk.

Without the ability to quickly determine only the individuals that are affected by an event, often organizations will use their mass notification system indiscriminately. A blanket notification will be sent to the entire company any time the system is used. This leads to recipients ignoring the vast majority of alerts and reduces response during highly critical times.

A CEM platform automatically locates all your people and assets and dynamically determines only those that need to be alerted. Sending only highly relevant communications to the correct people lessens notification burnout and keeps your critical event management effective and efficient.

Act: Communicate, Engage, Orchestrate

During a crisis, once you are aware of what is happening and you have located the assets and people who are potentially impacted, you use your mass notification system to tell people at risk what it is they need to do. Skipping the assessing and locating steps can render mass notifications irrelevant. They may alert on already outdated information as the situation is moving too quickly for teams to keep up with, or they are sent to the incorrect individuals.

However, the right mass notification solution works beyond the scope of a crisis. Mass notification working within a complete CEM platform allows for full integration across all systems. This means that mass notification can and should be used to manage everyday operations from providing detailed task lists to the correct teams, sending across necessary forms, or providing updates across an entire organization. Communication is as vital to everyday operations as it is during a crisis and having one solution that handles both enables maximum business continuity.

Analyze: Performance Organizations that implement mass notificationas as their only form of emergency preparedness technology tend to only focus on the success of message delivery and response. However, post- incident, organizations should have as much data as possible in order to determine exactly where improvements can be made.

A complete CEM strategy includes data-based analysis after any critical event. CEM enables all data from the incident to be collected so you can use it for process improvement and tabletop exercises. This builds resiliency and allows you to finetune details that will keep your people even safer and your organization running no matter what critical event may occur.

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WhitepaperEvolution of Mass Notification into Critical Event Management

CEM Use Cases: Five Facets of an Organization to Consider During a Critical Event

Now more than ever, C-level executives are concerned about how they will ensure resiliency and ultimately success across five main facets of organizations during a critical event. We’ll review each facet and how a complete CEM platform better prepares organizations to tackle various critical events.

Your People: Provide Duty of Care During a Hurricane

People are the most valuable asset to your company. Imagine a hurricane is approaching and is heading for the general area of one of your worksites. You need to be able to quickly identify, locate, communicate, and confirm the safety of your people who may be in harm’s way.

Using only a mass notification system depends on separate teams to manually track the hurricane’s path, determine what employees are working at the site, and what managers are available to receive task lists to prepare for the storm. Processes are scattered between siloed personnel systems and your mass notification system. This leads to confusion and results in delayed alerting putting your people at greater risk.

With a complete CEM platform, as soon as your system detects a hurricane heading toward your people, automation is triggered that can dynamically locate all of your potentially impacted employees. This enables you to send predefined storm preparation instructions to the correct individuals when every second counts, keeping all your people safe.

Your Buildings, Physical Infrastructure, and Operation: Keeping Businesses Running Amid Civil Unrest

When a critical event occurs, keeping your business and operations safe and running is key. Digitizing your processes with CEM allows your operations to adapt around an event, rather than shutting down and restarting operations after enduring an impact.

Many cities experienced civil unrest this past year. Without the proper technology and access to intelligence, organizations across the nation were left to guess as to whether facilities would be impacted and whether people needed be evacuated.

A business with a CEM platform has access to intelligence that could alert on the unrest in advance of it happening and show all assets potentially at risk. It would allow businesses to make informed decisions about remaining open and how to proactively protect facilities and/or assets from potential damage.

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WhitepaperEvolution of Mass Notification into Critical Event Management

Your Digital Infrastructure and Operations: Digital Transformation Led to Success During the Pandemic

During this past year, we all experienced the challenge of keeping businesses and operations running smoothly due to the pandemic. However, digitizing processes as much as possible facilitated continued success for organizations.

It is more apparent than ever that investing in technology will help your organization digitally transform into a smart enterprise. This enables agility when dealing with any critical event, not just the pandemic. How will you make your technology work for you? From smart automation, secure IoT management, big data and advanced analytics, these technologies will only serve to increase your ability to act quickly and effectively in the face of a disruption.

Your Supply Chain: Mitigating Disruptions

Proper management and optimization of supply chains and routes benefits from an overarching critical event management platform and strategy. CEM introduces automation allowing your organization to identify risks to suppliers, routes, and stops quickly and accurately.

Your IT Department & Cybersecurity: Protecting Against Digital Threats

As the world becomes increasingly virtual, critical events are no longer just physical threats to your assets. Protecting IT Systems from internal and external threats requires a solution that can operate in the cloud and ensure your organization is empowered to operate digitally with reduced risk.

Implementing a CEM platform and overall strategy helps streamline processes when IT incidents occur. CEM expedites the time it takes to validate system failures as well as identifying the available individuals that can assist with the problem. Every little step that CEM can automate throughout the lifespan of an IT outage adds up to massive amounts of money saved and ultimately improves customer satisfaction.

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WhitepaperEvolution of Mass Notification into Critical Event Management

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Be Proactive, Stay Compliant, Assess Your Technology, Ask Questions While it is difficult to imagine your organization being affected by a critical event, it has unfortunately become much more a “when” than an “if”. Being resilient requires taking proactive steps toward developing a plan and implementing the right technology that can successfully guide and protect your people and your assets before, during, and after a trying experience.

Further, more and more laws are being put in place that will eventually require enterprises to budget and plan for implementing certain critical event management technology. For example, recent legislation was passed that requires all enterprises with a Multi-Line Telephone System to comply with Kari’s Law and the RAY BAUM’s Act. These laws force organizations to consider both their notification and dynamic location capabilities.

Begin by scheduling dedicated assessments of your current risk management practices to determine whether your organization has outgrown them, or if they are working as effectively as possible for your evolving environment while remaining compliant with state and federal legislation.

Lastly, make sure you have a solution that can scale as your organization evolves. Ask your vendors if their solutions can cover all five facets of your organization. Can it successfully carry you through all four stages of a critical event? Ensuring you have a vetted solution that can grow with you, will provide your organization the tools to confidently conquer any challenge, keeping your people safe and your operations running smoothly.

If you would like to take the next step in learning about critical event management, watch this webinar: The Digital Path to Business Resilience and Continuity.

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Get in touch to learn about Everbridge, empowering resilience.

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About Everbridge Everbridge, Inc. (NASDAQ: EVBG) empowers enterprises and government organizations to anticipate, mitigate, respond to, and recover stronger from critical events. In today’s unpredictable world, resilient organizations minimize impact to people and operations, absorb stress, and return to productivity faster when deploying critical event management (CEM) technology. Everbridge digitizes organizational resilience by combining intelligent automation with the industry’s most comprehensive risk data to Keep People Safe and Organizations Running™.

For more information, visit Everbridge.com, read the company blog, and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.