The Noggin Blog

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.

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. 

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.

Frontline workers, especially healthcare professionals, have become the faces of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In areas hard hit by the rapid spread of the coronavirus, like Lombardy, New York City, and New Orleans, stories of the noble sacrifices of healthcare workers who have had to risk their personal safety to treat patients without an adequate stock of personal protective equipment (PPE) have proliferated – incomplete data sources point to at least 5,400 healthcare workers COVID-19 infections in the U.S. alone, with dozens of deaths.

The Incident Command System sprung out of a fire suppression event in the 1970s. But it didn’t take too long for non-fire organizations to begin using the system, as well.

The question is now as emergency response agencies mobilize against the COVID-19 pandemic, can ICS be relevant to their efforts?

If you didn’t know before, a mainstay of business continuity management is the business continuity plan (BCP), a collection of resources, actions, procedures, and information, designed to prepare organizations to maintain essential functions in the event of a major disruption like the coronavirus pandemic.