Organizations have adopted a Critical Event Management (CEM) platform, sometimes referred to as a visual command center, to support their physical security operations. The rationale for purchasing a CEM was to enhance organizational resilience by helping keep people safe and operations running smoothly. While these legacy CEM solutions were an improvement over manual processes, the industry has evolved and major gaps in these offerings have become apparent. Below, we look at the major benefits of a Critical Event Management platform and how TopoONE can compliment your global security operations center.
Making Better Data-driven Decisions
Legacy CEM systems typically have a closed architecture, making it impossible for users to add their own data and rapidly connect to external data feed APIs without relying on the legacy CEM vendor. Next-generation CEM platform such as TopoONE, make it easy for organizations to ingest data, analyze it by trend based upon where their assets are, and make strategic recommendations to the operational team. With many unknown crises likely to impact your organization, a next-generation CEM platform willallow you to rapidly ingest and access relevant data needed to make better data-driven decisions during a crisis.
Delivering consistent, compliant, and accelerated performance for team members. Next-generation CEM solutions, such as TopoONE, take operators beyond a static map by efficiently adjudicating risks and escalating critical events using compliant processes that are defined by security leadership within the CEM platform. These efficiency improvements are frequently achieved in multiple ways:
Next-generation CEM solutions allow disparate pieces of intelligence to be consolidated into one critical event. The inability of legacy CEM solutions to associate a variety of sources of intelligence into one critical event requires the operator to create an incident report outside of the legacy CEM platform itself, which actually creates additioanl work for the operator.
Critical events should be able to be processed by the relevant team based upon their coverage area. The ability to route workflows and give each operator their respective view of the platform with only their relevant critical events to manage reduces noise and simplifies duty of care responsibilities for the operators.
Each type of critical event should have its own unique workflow, such as a high temperature alert at a data center that should be processed and escalated differently than a bomb threat near a company office. Each unique workflow should include specific Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and forms to manage the critical event and an automated process to create an incident report for notification and escalation.
Communication and Crisis Response
Next-generation CEM platforms enable the rapid dissemination of critical event information. The various concentric circles of communication might include the GSOC team itself, the broader security team as well as security leadership, executive leadership and, all employees that are potentially impacted. The various methods of communication might vary - for example, the GSOC team might use groups on Slack to communicate the critical event within the security team itself, or they might also use email groups to communicate outside of the security group, or they might use text messaging to communicate the critical event in addition to the above methods, and finally they might connect and communicate the critical event to a larger audience using a mass communication system. The ability for the customer to design the communication modalities and create communication groups is critical as it helps to ensure a more rapid, and complete, communication. The CEM platform should also make available SOPs that define the organizational response based upon a certain kind of critical event. The CEM should automatically identify the relevant SOP and display it to the operator so that crisis response tasks can be assigned. The ability for the operator to automatically access the relevant SOP enables a crisis plan to be rapidly executed.
Analysis of Team Performance
Legacy CEM platforms were originally built as on-premise solutions and not purpose-built for the cloud.. Next-generation CEM platforms leverage data lakes that ingest, store, and record all data and actions taken inside the platform. On top of the data lake, next-generation CEM platforms, such as TopoONE, allow security organizations to measure and monitor individual and team performance by shift, by day, by week, by quarter, by year. This enables security leaders to measure performance, make improvements in processes, and communicate KPIs and performance metrics efficiently to senior leadership. Delivering a CEM platform capable of understanding a team’s performance through powerful analytics is increasingly becoming a foundational requirement for global security organizations.
A CEM platform is the technology foundation of any organization dedicated to keeping its employees safe, whether they’re on-site, working remotely, on the road, in the field, or in the air. When a critical event or emergency strikes, organizations need to rapidly assess the impact using relevant workflow processes, locate their people, and communicate with them to ensure their safety. Next-generation CEM platforms, like TopoONE, deliver significantly improved outcomes compared to legacy CEM solutions while dramatically improving operator efficiencies. Given the ever-increasing number of threats and unknown crises, now is the time to become better prepared for you and your team to manage those crises as effectively and efficiently as possible.
Discover how TopoONE by Crisis24 delivers a best-in-class integrated risk management solution to compliment your global security operations center.
