When a critical incident hits, the implications for the business could not be more profound. Whether it’s a productivity system that powers the efficiency of thousands of employees, or an online service that serves millions of customers and drives the company’s revenues - no organization can afford anything less than an immediate and effective resolution.
The Great Cost of an Incident
These systems and services are many, complex, business critical, and require full availability. But, when they go down, and the supporting staff does not have the right enablers in place for an efficient resolution, the consequences can be dire:
Not Even The Best-Prepared Are Immune
And, no company is immune to the occurrence of critical incidents. Consider this:
When Salesforce went down in August 2017, Business Insider noted: “On a serious side, an outage this big and this long is not good for Salesforce and its "service level agreements." SLAs require that customers get reimbursed if a cloud goes down for too long. In other words, Salesforce likely lost quite a bit of money on Tuesday.”
When Facebook was out for 19 minute in 2014, it was estimated to have lost $426,607.
Amazon lost $66,240 per minute for 30 minutes, when it went down in 2013, at a loss coming to $1.87 million.
It’s Complex, Complicated World
Complicating things even further is the growing digitization of organizations and the increasing number of devices through which services are consumed (by employees and customers). Furthermore, infrastructures are much more complex than ever, being dynamic, virtualized, often cloud-based, and mostly siloed.
Moreover, new and innovative products and services are being introduced in a dizzying pace, enabled by these digital transformations and SaaS-based business models. All this, makes it all the more challenging to keep up, prevent, and mitigate a critical incident.
The Cyber Component
Furthermore, when it comes to incidents that constitute cybercrime, the gravity of the consequences is no less, if not more dire.
According to Forbes, cybercrime is at epidemic levels, with losses expected to reach $2 trillion by 2019. And, of course, there is the impact on brand perception, with loss of faith on the part of customers and investors.
The question, then, is – what can organizations do to effectively and efficiently mitigate the impact of critical incidents, learn from each event, and reduce the chances of a repeat incident?
Key Enablers for Effective Critical Incident Management
The key to effectively managing a critical incident is a well-defined and orchestrated process that is supported by technology that can expedite resolution, ensure alignment, and increase the effectiveness of all involved stakeholders and teams.
Among the key enablers of such a process and technology are:
How Exigence Can Help
When a critical incident hits, Exigence can help. We have developed a cloud-based solution for effectively and efficiently managing critical incidents. Our solution immediately engages and onboards all the right stakeholders across the company as well as third party partners. It streamlines workflows, ensuring that the right action is taken in real time, and that all domain experts and parties of interest are providing optimized remediation efforts at peak performance, and that they are aligned and informed throughout the process.
