The Noggin Blog

The scale of the COVID-19 disruption to what had long been normal working arrangements has been unprecedented. Take remote work: an early April 2020 MIT survey revealed that nearly a third of all workers in the U.S. who had been employed the month before were working from home, up from five percent in 2017.

We’re proud to announce that our Noggin 2.0 integrated safety and security platform is now available in the AWS Canada Region, in addition to other generally available Noggin 2.0 zones around the world. Launched in December 2016, the Canada Region enables AWS customers in Canada to store data locally and address regional data compliance requirements.

At the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis, more than 70 percent of employers admitted not having a pandemic plan in place. That glaring lack of planning suggests that your clients might not be as prepared as they think to resume normal working operations, now that the conversation has shifted to business recovery.

For many organizations, COVID-19 has meant a halt to on-premise operations and the introduction of broad work-from-home policies.

Sure, that pivot has been key to business survival. But it does carry serious risk, including a greater opportunity for physical security incidents from less oversight. How to mitigate that risk with a remote, fragmented staff? Best-practice security standard, ISO 27001 offers some clues.

On the heels of a successful audit of its Noggin 2.0 platform under the Information Security Registered Assessors Program (IRAP), the integrated safety and security management technology provider passes another stringent security audit, designed to protect the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of information.

In the past, emergency management agencies and other organizations might have become accustomed to bleak forecasts of powerful hurricane seasons – like the one they received this year. They’ve never, however, had to prepare for an “above-normal” storm season while simultaneously fighting a “once-in-a-generation pathogen.” How can they beef up critical infrastructure resilience to respond to multiple events at once?

After months of disruption, organizations are eager to return to normal as part of the recovery lifecycle. For many, that means resuming operations in work facilities vacated due to local, state, and national lockdown orders.

Even before the outbreak of the coronavirus, Forrester findings had shown that a full 100 percent of surveyed companies had experienced at least one critical event in the last two years – many firms faced multiple. The impacts of those critical events might now pale in comparison to the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 crisis. Still, the fact remains, organisations must be ready.

Your clients might be more receptive to that message than ever. The question then is: how can you help them build an end-to-end crisis competency in this moment? We have some ideas. So, do some of our partners.

Early numbers from the COVID-19 response reveal long-simmering challenges in ensuring business continuity for most organizations. In one employer survey, only 37 percent of respondents said that they had the right technology in place for employees to conduct critical business operations from home in the event of an emergency. 

We’ve all seen the stories. The rapid spread of the coronavirus has caused demand spikes for personal protective equipment (PPE), with healthcare workers in areas hardest hit by the spread of the virus reporting alarming shortages of PPE like masks, gowns, and shields.