Critical Event Management Platforms: A Guide

In a crisis, every second counts, and even a brief delay can have significant consequences for your organization. While it’s imperative to have an incident response plan, that plan cannot survive without communication. It’s more than the lifeblood of your business—it’s the cornerstone of an effective response. 

Critical event management (CEM) combines these modalities. It brings crisis communication, incident management, and incident response into a unified framework. And with the right critical event management solution, a business can go from barely mitigating disruptive events to managing them easily. 

Critical event management platforms take the concept of critical event management a step further. They fill the gaps in an organization’s capabilities, ensuring businesses have the necessary information to resolve critical incidents more effectively and efficiently. In addition to secure emergency notifications, these platforms frequently include emergency management tools, analytics, risk management, and automation of incident management and remediation processes. 

For the private sector, a CEM platform allows organizations to minimize the impact of disruptive events while also keeping their people and assets out of harm’s way. In the public sector, they help agencies fulfill their duty of care by providing critical awareness and control in emergency scenarios. In both cases, CEM platforms ultimately serve the same function—enhancing incident response, emergency management, and continuity. 

Your organization faces an increasingly threatening landscape with more distributed work, the proliferation of connected endpoints, and growing disturbances to your supply chain. A robust CEM platform helps address these challenges in several ways: 

• Providing staff and response teams with earlier warnings of threats

• Automating the incident response process with templated alerts

• Planning and preparing for likely event scenarios

• Integrating with enterprise tools such as Microsoft Teams^®, Workday^® and ServiceNow^®

• Offering real-time visibility into the safety and status of employees

• Facilitating the constant exchange of accurate, up-to-date, geo-tagged information

• Automatically recording detailed incident logs for auditing purposes

• Delivering real-time, two-way notifications across multiple channels at any scale

• Providing insights to improve post-incident analysis

When assessing a CEM platform, consider these questions:

What Disruptions Do You Face?

Do you operate in areas prone to natural disasters or political instability? What are your most significant threats to safety and business continuity? Which incidents or events are likely to have the most significant impact?

What Regulatory Requirements Must You Follow?

Is there any legislation that may be relevant to your organization in the context of crisis management? What are your reporting, auditing, and data storage requirements for disruptive events? What are the consequences should your organization fail to fulfill its regulatory responsibilities? 

What Assets Do You Need to Protect?

People are your most important and valuable resource regardless of your industry or sector. With that said, you must also take inventory of your business’s assets. These include:

• Hardware/infrastructure

• Buildings and other physical assets

• Data

• Software

• Brand reputation

• Product inventory

• Supply chain assets

What Is Your Duty of Care?

At minimum, every organization is responsible for keeping its people safe during a crisis. However, if you work in the public sector, your duty of care may well extend beyond your staff. This is particularly true if your organization is involved in emergency response.

What Is Your Operating Environment?

What systems does your business typically use for communication and collaboration? What are the characteristics of the ecosystem into which your CEM platform would be deployed? Are there any non-negotiable integrations you require? 

What Is Your Budget?

How much are you willing to allocate to critical event management? Be sure to weigh this against the cost of a disruptive event should you be unable to mitigate it properly.