7 Reasons to Purchase Integrated Resilience Management Software

Introduction

Business risk has increased in kind, cost, and intensity. Simultaneously, threats themselves have become multi-directional.

Case in point: organizations today face physical security and geo-political risk, as well as more common threats from severe weather, cyber attacks, and everyday employee safety incidents.

Layered on to those are a new class of operational risk. These risks of doing business come from the increasing complexity of business processes and the rise of the post-Covid distributed workforce.

What is resilience management?

To address multifaceted risk to worker safety, business continuity, operational security, and more, organizations must invest in their resilience.

In the business world, resilience refers to the ability to recover quickly from a crisis and to bounce back better. What then are the set of business processes responsible for ensuring that that happens? That’s resilience management, the process of integrating all of an organization’s protective activities.

Resilience management, as we commonly understand it, consists of two primary areas: (1) readiness or preparedness and (2) response. Both areas fall under the unified resilience management structure.

Three main types of resilience management

What are the three main types of resilience management?

Operational resilience

Gartner defines operational resilience as initiatives that expand business continuity management programs to focus on the impacts, connected risk appetite, and tolerance levels for disruption of product or service delivery to internal and external stakeholders, e.g., employees, customers, citizens, and partners.

Organizational resilience

The broad category of resilience management known as organizational resilience refers to the ability of an enterprise to absorb change and adapt to a new environment.

Cyber resilience

According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, cyber resilience is the ability to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to adverse conditions, stresses, attacks, or compromises on systems that use or are enabled by cyber resources. A set of capabilities, cyber resiliency enables companies to pursue those business objectives dependent on cyber resources in a contested cyber environment.

The role of integrated resilience management software

Unifying these types of resilience management under one digital banner is the role of integrated resilience management software.

These integrated software solutions cover all aspects of resilience management, including incident and crisis management, situational awareness, business continuity, risk and compliance, security operations, and threat intelligence.

At a glance, integrated resilience management platforms cover some of the following components:

• Contextual threat intelligence
• Robust communication
• Detailed incident task management
• Added safety measures

Why integrated, though? Integrated resilience management technology ensures that all necessary capabilities are in one place not spread out across various solutions. To put a finer point on it: resilience data, reporting, and analysis are all consolidated and available across their entire lifecycle.

Besides eliminating information silos, this level of integration provides a consistent user experience. Practitioners manage any type of event with familiar tools and workflows – and not just any type, but any scale, as well

Integrated resilience management tools can go from the business-as-usual routine to crisis and back to routine again.

The cumulative effect of this level of flexibility is the lowering of total cost of ownership (TCO), not to mention decreasing administrative burden, automating planning and response, and ultimately ensuring business resilience.

Reasons to purchase integrated resilience management software

As discussed, the multi-faceted nature of business risk makes single-use point solutions outmoded and expensive. But is there an affirmative business case for purchasing integrated resilience management software today? We think there is.

Here, then, are the seven reasons to purchase integrated resilience management software today:

1. Answers multiple use cases in an integrated manner

By their very nature, integrated resilience management platforms are comprehensive. That allows the organizations that purchase them to consolidate and optimize all aspects of business resilience and human safety within one single platform, with various use-case based modules included.

2. Delivers the necessary context for decision-making processes

Given the risk context today, data is paramount. But not all information is valuable. By definition, threat intelligence, referring to information that’s been aggregated, transformed, analyzed, interpreted, or enriched to provide the necessary context for decision-making processes, is.

What does threat intelligence have to do with integrated resilience management platforms, though? The platforms often come equipped with the following advanced threat intelligence capabilities:

• Monitor alerts about potential threats, receive relevant notifications, capture alerts, and escalate them into incident management
• Combine alerts with personnel and asset data to see who and what may be impacted
• Trigger notifications to affected personnel and assets, either in-app, via email, SMS, and/or voice messages
• Enrich situational awareness during ongoing incidents by adding further intelligence from threat monitoring

3. Provides the right data and metrics across their business

The business benefit of threat intelligence is that the historical intelligence and analysis it affords will give organizations the ability to learn from past events, experiment with different approaches, and make better-informed decisions.

But with integrated resilience management software, that benefit goes beyond the security sphere, with which threat intelligence is most commonly associated.

Indeed, the issues of data fragmentation, low data quality, inability to access real-time data, inconsistent data interpretation, and ineffective analysis of data aren’t just limited to security management. They are generalized challenges of achieving resilience itself.

To surmount the obstacle, integrated resilience management software streamlines data collection and analysis; via integration capabilities across other systems, these solutions also enhance the quality of risk assessment and the identification of system vulnerabilities.

4. Automates incident response

Crises aren’t just growing in kind; they’re accelerating in tempo, as well.

Speed in incident response, which has always been essential to protecting a company’s reputation, minimize damage, and ensure resiliency, has therefore gotten even more important.

The data, however, suggests that activation speed hasn’t increased significantly.

One proven way to cut down activation times and accelerate incident response is with incident response automation. A capability in certain integrated resilience management platforms, incident response automation uses rule-driven logic to:

• Automatically analyze and correlate data from different sources to identify and triage incidents that threaten an organization’s resilience
• Automatically complete routine, standardized tasks to expedite the incident response process and increase response efficiency and effectiveness

How exactly? The platforms in question enable organizations to effectively prepare for and manage disruption by managing all recovery strategies as well as plans and playbooks in one centralized location.

This level of centralization facilitates standardization of response plan templates, protocols, and guidelines, ensuring easy access, enhanced coordination, and reduced risk of critical information being missed.

5. Facilitates communication

Although we’re seeing different types of disasters emerge, basic needs during and after crises haven’t changed that much. Just like with speed, accuracy in crisis and emergency communication also remains crucial to keeping employees and customers safe.

How to achieve it with integrated resilience management software? The platforms help organizations proactively ensure all stakeholders are alerted to threats and incidents quickly, via the best methods to reach them.

Often that method is pre-planned message templates. Here, dynamic content populated from a related event or other data reduces response time and ensures delivery of accurate and consistent messages when it matters the most.

Location-based messaging also helps. Thanks to this capability, organizations can easily identify personnel and assets in the vicinity of an event and trigger notifications to quickly get vital messages to them.

6. Ensures regulatory compliance

One area of resilience that’s received outsized attention recently is operational resilience. And that’s because, major regulators in the following jurisdictions have all promulgated new operational resilience guidance in recent years:

1. 1. The U.K.
   2. Australia
   3. The U.S.
   4. The European Union

These regulations have all upped the burden on entities to enhance wide-ranging enterprise capabilities, such as governance, operational risk management, business continuity planning and testing, mapping of interdependencies of critical operations, third-party dependency, incident management, and ICT risk management.

Integrated resilience management software addresses these discrete domains to expedite compliance and validate adherence to the latest regulations on an ongoing basis.

How exactly? The platforms connect the people, processes, and tools required for organizations to enhance their operational resilience, so they can minimize the impact of disruptions and still deliver critical products and services to meet their obligations to customers, stakeholders, and the wider economy.

More specifically, these solutions elevate governance effectiveness, with the ability to centralize governance, appropriately distribute responsibilities, and automate compliance monitoring, to promote consistency and alignment with strategic objectives.

Add to that, integrated resilience management software also has a role to play in bolstering risk awareness itself, through real-time monitoring, strategic reporting, and enhanced risk assessment capabilities.

7. Limits third-party risk exposure

In passing operational resilience statutes, policymakers often reference the rise of third-party risk. That’s why the regulations themselves often have such stringent requirements for third-party risk management and monitoring.

As noted above, investing in integrated resilience management software takes companies a long way towards regulatory compliance. But for companies who are not under a regulatory burden (and even for those who are), limiting third-party risk exposure for its own merits is just as significant.  

One of the benefits of integrated resilience management platforms is they allow organizations to collaborate with third parties in a unified workspace dedicated to enhancing resilience.

What’s more, using automated workflows to invite vendors and gather due diligence information using questionnaires and documents, these technologies serve to simplify the onboarding process for third parties. And once onboarded, service details, contracts, and risk assessments are set up in collaboration with vendors to ensure alignment between parties.

Conclusion

Finally, with disruptions coming in all shapes and sizes, resilience has never been more important. But not all software solutions will do to enhance your ability to respond to sudden disruptions that could threaten your operations, brand, or reputation.

So, when it comes to maintaining resilience, go with integrated resilience management software like Noggin. Combining ten solutions in one, Noggin provides a comprehensive and holistic approach to resilience, facilitates crucial collaboration and coordination, unlocks critical insights, keeps stakeholders informed, and streamlines essential workflows for planning and response.

Don’t just take our word for it, though. Request a demonstration to see Noggin in action for yourself.