The Noggin Blog

Nowadays, more people are working than ever before. And with the advent of remote work, those people are working from anywhere, at any time.

Security operations centers offer some pretty clear business benefits: improved situational awareness and visibility, reduced long-term security costs, and less operational security siloing. But despite the manifold benefits, SOC adoption isn’t universal. Far from it: in fact, according to EY’s Global Information Security Survey, 2017-2018, just half (or so) of all surveyed organizations have an SOC. What’s going on with the rest?

When it comes to spending on compliance, companies aren’t shy. Every year, the average multinational will easily shell out millions on compliance, according to reporting in Harvard Business Review. In heavily-regulated sectors, that number is even higher. 

Accident reports show that as many as 90 percent of industrial accidents are attributable to human error. But poor procedures and processes can make those human errors well-nigh inevitable, especially in the world of hazardous work. And that’s why teams involved in non-routine work need to implement stringent work controls to keep everyone safe and reduce risk.

Crisis can happen at any time, arising from a single devastating event or a series of unattended issues. Either way it comes about, crisis, once underway, presents a serious threat to a business’s core objectives, reputation – even its viability.

From profits to press to badly-need infrastructure projects, major events can bring any number of lasting benefits to organizers and host sites. Conversely, the risks of running a major event are acute and variegated. So too are the penalties for botching it: public opprobrium, reputational damage, possibly even legal challenge and regulatory blowback. For organizers, effective all-hazards planning is the only solution to help mitigate topline risk and keep attendees safe. But with so many variables involved in major-event management, it’s easy to ask, how to get started?

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.

By now, we know the grizzly details of the March 15 terror attacks at the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch, the deadliest mass shooting incident in New Zealand history. All told, fifty people were killed, and scores injured at the hands of a self-described white supremacist.

A run-through of what happened

How prepared are organizations to tackle critical issues and major crises? That’s the question we at Noggin and our partner Deloitte have been posing to invited guests in our inaugural series of breakfast seminars, exploring the theme of overconfidence and crisis preparedness.

By now, most know at least the outlines of the story. In October 2018, Lion Air Flight 670 crashed into the Java Sea on a domestic route from Jakarta to Pangkal Pinang in Indonesia. All 189 passengers and crew on board were killed. Weeks later, engine failure forced a Norwegian Air Shuttle flight to make an emergency landing in Iran. And more recently, on March 10, 2019, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed just minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on its way to Nairobi, Kenya. As in the case of the Lion Air crash, all 150-plus passengers and crew on board perished. The common factor between the seemingly isolated incidents? The aircraft in all three flights belonged to a relatively new line of planes: the Boeing 737 Max 8.