The Noggin Blog

*If you'd like to discuss your client portfolio, existing implementations, and/or how to take Noggin forward with your customers, please contact us at partners@noggin.io to schedule a meeting.

Crisis management plans are great. But if we’ve learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s that they aren’t enough to ensure that your clients are prepared for a protracted crisis.

After all, when a crisis breaks, it’s execution that matters. And seamless execution entails regular training in crisis-like conditions. How to help your clients create those conditions? 

When many in-person industries shut down at the beginning of the pandemic, remote work took off. An unintended consequence of these rapidly assembled teleworking arrangements, though, was the steep rise in cyber attacks.

But attacks themselves aren’t the only incidents Security teams and their enterprises have to worry about. There’s also the reporting that comes after. 

Even in the age of COVID-19, getting resources to the right place at the right time is still only half the battle. Relief organisations and agencies still confront barriers, ensuring that those resources are productive once on site. What’s one of the most difficult, and how to overcome it? 

With broad swaths of the economy once again open, entities involved in hazardous operations and other forms of non-routine work will need to re-implement stringent, work risk controls.

By law, those controls should go above and beyond safe work protocols for routine jobs. So how do PCBUs go about taking formalised steps to mitigate the work health and safety risks associated with dangerous jobs?

Remote work has taken off since the start of the pandemic, and so has the cyber threat. Already in March, online attacks had shot up six times their February levels. As we now know, that surge would only accelerate – to dire consequences for businesses already struggling to respond to COVID-19.

What can organisations do to respond to the crisis threat? These crisis planning practices will help. 

If you'd like to discuss your client portfolio, existing implementations, and/or how to take Noggin forward with your customers, please contact us at partners@noggin.io to schedule a meeting.

In the wake of COVID-19, your clients probably understand the importance of being prepared for what have now become near-inevitable crises. But have they taken the next step, developing a best-practice crisis management capability that hews closely to prescribed standards in the field?

Unlikely, when it comes to crisis management. But there’s something you can do about it.

What’s the value of international standards in the age of COVID-19? Well, in the case of information management system standard, ISO/IEC 27001, the standard prescribes baselines for securing information assets. If you haven’t noticed, those information assets are increasingly under threat with the sharp rise of cyber attacks.

So, what should Security teams know about the best-practice standard?

With a worsening risk climate in the age of COVID-19, how can businesses prepare for the unexpected? Well, at the core of business resilience and preparedness lies the business impact analysis (BIA). The BIA gives organisations an intimate understanding of how their prioritised business activities would be impacted by crises, disasters, or disruptions.

In incident management (more broadly) and incident command (more specifically), major incidents are commonly defined as events that require an extraordinary allocation of resources, usually due to the location, severity, type, and/or number of victims. Incidents of this kind are varied in nature. But one constant is that their management usually involves responders coming together from different jurisdictions, geographies, and rescue services. Healthcare organisations quite obviously play a prominent role.

Just last month, there were five named storms in the Atlantic all at once – a rarity last seen in the early 1970s. Nor is the Atlantic the only hotspot for storm activity. The interim Royal Commission investigation into last season’s bushfires also forecasted increasingly “erratic” storms hitting Australia.

For crisis leaders battered by COVID-19 yet still in the path of surging storms, it’s not only time to dust off your severe weather preparedness plans but also to get acquainted with the Incident Command System (ICS).