The Noggin Blog

Ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements is critical to your client’s business. But crisis and business continuity planning – often mandated by law – shouldn’t be a box-ticking exercise. Unfortunately, too many of your clients fall into the trap. What risks do they face treating crisis preparedness as a compliance-first practice? 

First things first: regulatory mandates following crises are ubiquitous – that’s been the case far before the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. In the U.S., for instance, employers with more than ten workers must have written emergency action plans that specify what workers and others at the workplace should do in the event of an emergency.

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.

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.

Practical business continuity software solution to provide organizations with the tools needed to effectively assess business risks and impact, coordinate responses to disruptions, and manage incidents, from the smallest outage to a major crisis.

IRAP enables Australian government agencies and bodies to store and run highly sensitive data at the Protected security level.

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Natural disasters are growing in kind, cost, and intensity. We see evidence of it all the time. Having recently lived in California, I experienced back-to-back cataclysmic wildfire seasons – last year’s North California season left air in the Bay Area so smoke-laden that it ranked among the dirtiest in the world. And now, my home state of New South Wales faces the same scenario, a longer, more intense bush firefighting season, already on track to be the worst in decades.

Everywhere you turn, disruptive critical events are in the news – so too, the companies they affect. Just look at the Forrester report, Take A Unified Approach To Critical Event Management: the study finds that 100 percent – yes, you read that right – of companies surveyed had experienced a critical event in the last two years. That’s not even the full extent of it. Many of those companies actually dealt with multiple incidents during that time frame: the average was four, discrete critical events in a two-year period.

No doubt, you’ve heard of a team of rivals: the idea, popularized in a history of Abraham Lincoln, of recruiting your ablest rivals to positions of prominence and using their acumen in times of turmoil. Turns out, the theoretical concept isn’t that different from what actually happens in crisis management. Only, there, organizations staff crisis teams with business experts, rather than political rivals.

Over the last few years, companies have taken major steps to get their crisis preparedness house(s) in order. For instance, the 2016 Institute of Crisis Management (ICM) Annual Crisis Report found that only half of all global organizations had crisis management plans in place. Fast forward to this year, when Deloitte released the findings of its global survey of 500 crisis management executives. That study, “Stronger, fitter, better: Crisis management for the resilient enterprise,” showed that no less than 84 percent of companies had crisis management plans in place. Not the same sample set, to be sure, but still a major jump in crisis management preparedness. But though companies seem to have cottoned on completely to the crisis threat, they’re not out of the woods quite yet. That’s because the reality of crisis is completely different than the ersatz version you’ll find in crisis plans and simulations.

When compliance aims drive your crisis planning, they do so to your detriment. I know, sounds a little counter-intuitive, especially when regulators mandate that businesses prepare emergency plans for the workplace.