Some critical events may be familiar to organizations, they may happen repeatedly or even on a set schedule. Others may present new challenges that responders haven’t seen or experienced before. In a worst-case scenario, events could even happen concurrently, forcing responders to split their attention while trying to anticipate and account for the combined effects.
Accelerated trends toward hybrid and remote work compounded with the increasing frequency of critical events — such as severe weather, violence, and other threats — have made it more difficult for organizations to keep their people safe. Thankfully, today’s HR professionals are rising to the challenge with the help of technology.
As critical events increase in frequency and magnitude, organizations need to ensure that building and maintaining operational resilience is incorporated into their long-term strategy. Operational resilience is more than just having a plan to respond to critical events as they happen; it’s a critical step built into every strategy to ensure that businesses are prepared to face the unexpected.
Business continuity is a crucial part of any scalable operations plan, but many businesses fail to realize how important it is until their first critical emergency. Only then does business continuity management come to the forefront of planning exercises, and stakeholders are forced to reflect on what went wrong, why it went wrong, and determine if they can avoid it happening again, or be better prepared if it does. The true business continuity management lifecycle begins long before an incident.
Today’s global risk landscape has made digital and physical security even more complex and nuanced, especially considering major critical events like the invasion of Ukraine, which demonstrate that one massive critical event can create many others globally with far-reaching effects. These can include displacement of people, physical security threats, cyber-attacks, and other devastating impacts.
Reliability, scalability, and innovation are three terms at the forefront of any discussion about how businesses can achieve long-term success. When you put those three together, you create a business that’s capable of producing the best possible product with the least amount of waste, known simply as a lean enterprise. Being a lean enterprise is the ideal state for most organizations but becoming one can be an ambitious all-hands-on-deck undertaking. The best way to do this?
After a crisis, a human-made or natural disaster, or any other type of emergency, organizations need to resume day-to-day operations as quickly and as smoothly as possible. An organization’s ability to recover from a disaster requires careful planning, testable processes, and the right technology. According to a study from Ponemon Institute, the average cost of data center downtime is almost $9,000 per minute.
Business travel has long been essential to organizations looking to triumph across national and international landscapes. However, the evolving impacts of COVID-19 brought dramatic changes to the world of travel and put business travelers at an increased risk of harm.
Hurricanes pose immense risk to the safety of an organization’s people, the continuity of operations, and the connectivity of communications systems. During a hurricane, critical event managers must be able to communicate crucial safety information to the people for which they are responsible. In addition to hurricane preparedness, critical event managers should ready their business in the case of any severe weather event.
A smart building is any structure that uses automated processes to automatically control a building’s operations, according to Phillip Tracy from RCR Wireless. As technology has evolved, buildings have become smarter. Smart buildings using Critical Event Management (CEM) systems are even more technologically advanced.
