Business leaders have always been advocating preparing for “Black Swan” events.

A “Black Swan” is defined as an event having three characteristics: “rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability.”
Current pandemic and increasingly extreme weather situations all over the world are making the leaders rethink their operational resilience and business continuity strategies.

They are pondering if there is any guide to identify, getting ready for, and responding effectively and efficiently to critical events?

Is there any solution available that would automate and accelerate organisations’ operational response to critical events to keep people safe and businesses running?

It’s important to remember that business-threatening disasters can take many forms. It’s not always a destructive natural disaster (earthquakes, floods, pandemics). In fact, it’s far more common to experience disaster from “the inside” – events that hurt your productivity or affect your IT infrastructure and are just as disruptive to your operations.

Incidents like cyberattacks, data loss, malware and viruses, hardware and software failures, internet, and network disruptions are some of the “inside events” that can hurt your business operations.

It would require an integrated approach to aggregate risk data, locate people and assets under threat, initiate action and manage incidents, and analyse after-action performance.

An Integrated and Unsiloed Approach to Improve Operational Resilience

Organisations are investing significant resources in sophisticated controls to protect people, brands, and assets from multiple threats. These disruptive incidents (ranging from extreme weather to IT outages) increasingly lead to operational losses, brand damage, and
concerns for health and safety.

Despite the investment, companies struggle to optimise their critical event management (CEM) operation, slowing down response time and creating potentially life-threatening confusion. As a result, companies are turning toward continuous-resolution and a unified approach to critical event management that links security and business operations.

Organisations with a unified approach will see a return on their investment in the form of reduced mean time to identify, know, fix, and resolve events — the real measures of a successful critical event management strategy.

Companies that work to integrate their approach across silos also stand a chance of a significant reduction in the impact that critical events have on safety, reputation, and revenue.

Technology will help them to be prepared, provide them with the ability to monitor risk intelligence, and give them the means of communicating with employees, wherever they are and protect them in the process.

Managing Critical Events – Efficient, Automated and Collaborative Process

In an increasingly uncertain world, there is a need for companies to increasingly taking a unified approach (also known as the cross-functional fusion center approach) to combat the widespread damage of critical events.

These organisations need to work across business units, combining internal resources, technology, and business services, such that operations to detect and manage multiple critical events beyond strictly securing facilities.

Businesses today will likely suffer multiple critical events every year, resulting in millions of dollars in unexpected costs, operational disruption, and real threats to their workforce, customers, or suppliers.

Managing multiple threats, therefore, has become a new operational imperative. To anticipate, manage, and curb disruptions to business continuity, leading COOs are embracing a unified approach to CEM, enabled by tested, purpose-built technology.

Given the growth of critical event risks, it is no longer an option for one job function to reactively address this risk or rely on their C-suite peers, such as the Chief Security Officer, to be responsible for managing this risk. Effective business continuity demands that the entire organisation right from COOs to Chief Security Officer (CSO), Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Chief Information Officer (CIO), Chief Risk Officer (CRO), and their Chief People Officer (CPO) come together to make it as an organisational imperative.