With the rising frequency of emergency incidents like natural disasters impacting whole areas and cyberattacks targeting individuals and businesses, crisis management teams have their work cut out for them in 2025. Also, as the average magnitude of each incident has increased over time, each one will predictably last longer, be more likely to overlap with another, and will require more resources to minimize damage, mitigate risk, and promote recovery.
Therefore, emergency incident response teams have increasingly turned away from manual processes for emergency preparation, response, or recovery efforts, as these options require the duplication of efforts and create opportunities for human error. Instead, they’re looking to more efficient digital incident management solutions, such as emergency incident management software, to meet the needs of the moment.
As with the adoption of any digital solution, familiar questions arise around key areas like data security, accessibility, scalability, and biggest of all, cost. But to address these concerns, many digital solutions, including digital emergency incident command software, have shifted toward cloud-based systems instead. This was made possible by the increased availability of internet connectivity and greater processing power in personal computers and smart devices.
To understand why a cloud-based incident management system could be what you need to improve your organization’s resilience posture, we’ll lay out just what cloud computing is, the ways in which emergency incident management calls for a cloud-based approach, and the benefits of a cloud-based management system over a more localized digital solution.
What is cloud computing?
When your organization determines what type of physical IT infrastructure it needs in order to operate, and purchases hardware to make those resources available to employees, this is called an on-premises setup. This means your company must maintain its own hardware, such as servers and data storage, software licenses, and networking capabilities. Your organization will also need trained IT personnel on hand to maintain, change, or fix resources as needed.
On the other hand, cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources — including software, servers, data storage, networking capabilities, and analytics — over the internet from a remote physical location. These services can be accessed from any place with a secure internet connection and are available on an as-needed basis, such that your organization would not need to purchase or manage any servers or other physical IT infrastructure.
How the nature of crisis response calls for a cloud-based approach to emergency incident management software
Many things come to mind when you think of an emergency: danger, fear, even panic. But the overarching reason for these responses is disruption of the status quo. If you had physical safety before, its disruption yields danger; if you felt emotional safety, its disruption yields fear and panic. So, the best kind of crisis response solution is that which minimizes disruption by keeping systems functional and keeping people informed, thereby driving safety and calm.
Emergency response planning software can only minimize such disruption if it’s consistently operable throughout the emergency in question. Since a cloud-based incident management system is decentralized by design, it’s less prone to disruptions resulting from localized incidents and more likely to consistently deliver reliable crisis response assistance when you need it most.
For example, if an earthquake occurs at or near your organization’s physical location, it’ll affect every type of physical infrastructure in the area, including your buildings and equipment. So, if you’re housing your own servers or other physical IT infrastructure to support on-premises emergency incident command software, there’s a strong chance that these resources can be knocked offline by the very emergency they are intended to guide you through.
The same is true for other types of emergencies as well. For example, if your organization is the target of a cyberattack or data breach, this typically means a third party is trying to gain unauthorized access to your IT infrastructure. If the same physical hardware houses both the proprietary data that’s the target of the breach and your emergency response planning software, such a breach could impair your crisis response solution at the worst possible time.
The benefits of cloud-based incident management on crisis response
The structure of a cloud-based incident management system also offers greater resilience than an on-premises emergency incident solution in a number of key areas:
Data security
Relying on a decentralized IT infrastructure makes it harder for cybercriminals to successfully locate and access sensitive information for which your organization has the responsibility of security. Cloud-computing platforms understand the need for their customers to maintain the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of data held on their networks, leaving your organization to focus on delivering the best products and services it can.
This way, your organization doesn’t have to know or learn how to build security infrastructure to defend against the latest data breach methods because your provider specializes in exactly that. It’s still hugely important to thoroughly evaluate any third-party IT service provider both before and after selecting them as a partner, but this analysis should always be part of your organization’s overall third-party risk assessment and risk management strategies.
Accessibility
For your crisis response team to access on-premises incident management software during an emergency, each member would need to have a device with a previously downloaded app or continuous access to your local network — something no emergency will ever guarantee. But all a cloud-based incident management system requires is a smart device with a secure internet connection, which is far more likely to be available during a crisis-level incident.
Also, as we detailed earlier, emergencies like natural disasters can have such a destructive impact on your physical infrastructure that it knocks your on-premises crisis response solution offline. On the other hand, the physical infrastructure for a cloud-based management system will be in a remote location — or, more likely, a network of multiple remote locations backing each other up — to maintain a nearly 100% uptime when their guidance is required.
Scalability and adaptiveness
Cloud-computing platforms are built to serve many customers at once, so it’s easy to scale up your cloud-based incident management system should your organization relocate or expand to more than one location. This also enables your team to collaborate and coordinate a crisis response from multiple locations, and include relevant stakeholders during critical situational awareness briefings, decision-making sessions, and the execution of incident action plans.
Also, should a large-scale emergency incident affect a large area, cloud-based incident management solutions are designed with enough bandwidth to handle the increased demand. No matter how many team members are accessing it at once, or how many solutions or processes are running at the same time, cloud-based platforms are built to flex and deliver all the resources your crisis response team needs to manage ongoing incidents.
Cost
Your organization must always have access to emergency incident solution resources, but since cloud-based incident management solutions deliver IT resources on demand, many such platforms offer competitive pricing to match. It should be noted that pricing may vary based on the size of your organization or the number of team members who require access.
Additionally, by working with a cloud-based incident management system, your organization doesn’t need to pay the upfront costs associated with designing and building out your own on-premises hardware or space to house the equipment. You also don’t need to hire on-site IT personnel to maintain or fix equipment, as those costs are already built into your cloud-based provider’s pricing plan, so the upfront capital needed to initiate such a solution is far less.
How to choose a cloud-based incident management system
Emergency response planning software enables every team member to work from the same single source of truth during a crisis, for situational awareness and decision-making. And while a cloud-based incident management platform has many advantages to help you maintain resilience over an on-premises digital crisis management solution, they’re not all the same.
When selecting a cloud-based incident management partner, look for a system that lets you:
- Scale automatically at all levels
- Maintain a minimum of 99.9% availability at all times
- Create virtual Emergency Operations Center (EOC) with tailored workflows, collaboration capabilities, and clear communication channels
- Coordinate a swift and effective response to any incident, regardless of the types of danger, damage, or hazards involved
- Manage emergency assets and resources including credentials and certifications, ensuring you have the right resources ready to respond
- Keep connected during emergencies via email, SMS, voice message, push notifications, or within the platform itself
- Maintain comprehensive incident logs and timelines to keep visibility high and accountability present both during and after response
- Gather organized incident notes with ready-to-go forms and templates hosted in the cloud with nothing to install
- Map the locations of critical infrastructure and their threat level from extreme weather by integrating Esri ArcGIS, WMS, KML, GeoJASON, or other sources
Most importantly, relying on a cloud-based system for emergency incident response is the most advanced way your organization can ensure the highest level of personal safety, business continuity, and overall resilience. So, don’t wait until a crisis finds you — request a demo of Noggin today and check it out for yourself.
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