Skip Navigation
BlackBerry Blog

The Business Case for a Unified Approach to Managing Critical Events

What do the terms “critical event management” (CEM) and “emergency mass notification systems” (EMNS) mean to you? If you’re like most people, you associate them with fires, floods, hurricanes, and other natural disasters that have the potential to wreak havoc, disrupt businesses, and cost lives. And you’re not wrong.

However, an increasing number of people now rank man-made disruptions – from IT outages to deliberate cyberattacks – as even bigger factors affecting their lives. So says a new BlackBerry-sponsored research paper by Aberdeen Strategy and Research Institute, titled How Critical Event Management Limits the Risks of IT Disruptions and Cyber Attacks

In fact, respondents to an Aberdeen survey cited “IT failure of business-critical system” and “Supply chain disruption” as the top non-pandemic disruptions they had experienced during the previous year. The former category includes not only “data center issues and downed servers,” but also “outages at many top cloud and Internet infrastructure providers.” The category “Natural disaster/extreme weather” disruptions ranked fifth, below “Cyberattack.” 

As Aberdeen notes, traditional emergency notification and response systems were not designed to address IT issues and the “needs and pressures of IT and cybersecurity roles.” For example, corporate emergency management teams are not solely responsible for managing power or network outages caused by major storms. But critical events don’t respect organizational silos. For a business to resume normal operations, IT organizations must bring business-critical systems back online when power is restored. Likewise, incident responders in the security operations center (SOC) share responsibility with emergency management staff, corporate counsel, and other groups in limiting the risks and impacts of a ransomware attack on employees, partners, customers, and other stakeholders.

To meet these challenges, Aberdeen found that businesses are deploying next-generation CEM systems “designed to integrate all teams, manage any problem, and keep businesses resilient and safe.” Thus, Aberdeen finds it unsurprising that respondents with IT and cybersecurity roles are much more likely (65%) to embrace CEM compared to all other respondents (35%) for the additional tools and capabilities CEM’s offer.

The returns on these investments in business continuity can be significant. According to the study, organizations with state-of-the-art CEM systems in place are:

  • Three times more likely to resolve critical events in less than a day
  • Twice as likely to experience little or no revenue impacts from critical events

We invite you to learn more about the impact of CEM on IT security by reading How Critical Event Management Limits the Risks of IT Disruptions and Cyber Attacks. Topics include:

  • The key issues motivating businesses to upgrade their CEM capabilities
  • The operational, administrative, and competitive benefits they expect from doing so
  • Guidelines for building a robust “next-gen” CEM infrastructure

Click here to download your copy today.

Sabrina Forgione

About Sabrina Forgione

Sabrina Forgione is Director Channel Marketing Enterprise, at BlackBerry.