As we are all adjusting to this new reality of living and working in the time of COVID-19, the coronavirus, there is so much that we need to take into consideration.
Clearly, the health and safety of our family and colleagues is priority number one – and the local authorities have provided guidance on how to maximize protection.
Today, I’d like to share with you some thoughts and tips on maximizing the protection of our critical business systems, as well as some insights on the importance of having a virtual command and control center for facilitating the efficacy of our incident resolution teams and efforts.
Namely, at Exigence, as you know – we live and breathe critical incidents, how to accelerate resolution, and how to mitigate the risk as we minimize damage.
Though, achieving these goals in the age of corona has become more challenging than ever. Namely, with more and more workers being encouraged and even asked to work from home, such as recently seen at Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, making sure the incident team can manage incidents seamlessly and effectively has become a greater challenge than ever.
Furthermore, with work from home (WFH) employees being more reliant on accessing cloud-based systems and collaborating through cloud-based communications tools – the availability of these systems has never been more important.
Should something happen to compromise the availability of these systems and tools, whether via cyberbreach or other, the reach of impact will be unprecedented in both depth and breadth.
Moreover, the greater the cloud usage, the greater the chance of data leaving a secured perimeter, leaving the organization exposed to security incidents in new and greater ways.
This is why it’s never been more important to make sure that your incident response team – regardless of how dispersed – is spot on when it comes to knowing exactly who is doing what, what they need to do, that they can do it in real time, that everyone who needs to be on board is on board – regardless of where they’re actually located (at home or in the office), and that there are no duplications of efforts.
Through extensive support of many organization around the world in their goal to improve incident resolution capabilities, we have found that one of the main pillars upon which stellar incident resolution rests is having a virtual command and control center, or virtual Situation Room.
This is the only way to make sure that dispersed and work-from home-employees, who are part of the incident team, can manage a critical incident effectively – even in these most challenging of times.
This is why, it was essential for us to offer our customers the Exigence Situation Room to help global incident response teams execute efficiently and effectively – regardless of where each team member is located.
Through the Exigence Situation Room:
- Stakeholders come together to get briefed, onboarded, aligned, and updated
- Team members are assigned to roles clearly, quickly, and comprehensively
- Incident management and documentation is centralized
- Reports and updates are automatically sent to every stakeholder, including management in real time with action items and/or updates about progress
There really is no other to get critical incident management right in critical times.
For more information on how Exigence and our virtual Situation Room can help you bolster your incident resolution capabilities , I invite you to reach out to us at info@exigence.io.
And, in the meantime, I also invite you to get some insights from free research offered by Gartner on: “Business continuity management during a pandemic.”
Wishing you, your families, and colleagues, health and safety (as well as productivity and endurance) in these challenging times.
