What is crisis management?
Crisis management is preparing for and handling larger and more complicated disruptive events from start to finish. Crisis management is aligned with business continuity and disaster recovery planning and execution, allowing organizations to respond holistically in crisis situations to protect and resume ongoing operations and infrastructure.
Why is effective crisis management important?
According to a 2018 Deloitte study, Nearly 60 percent of respondents (of more than 500 crisis management executives) believe that organizations face more crises today than they did 10 years ago. Further, 80 percent of their organizations had to mobilize their crisis management teams at least once in the past two years. It's a sobering statistic which leads to an obvious conclusion that crisis management shouldn’t start with a crisis because at that point it is probably already too late.
Effective crisis management entails preparing for different types of crisis events that could likely occur, as well as adequately managing the event when it happens. Much goes into being ready for a crisis event, in fact 99% of the work happens before a crisis event ever occurs. For example, organizations must identify what types of events could occur (natural and man-made disaster), what could go wrong, and which areas of the organization could be impacted. Crisis plans must be coordinated with recovery plans for areas of the business or IT that could be disrupted. Testing must be performed to see how crisis and recovery plans stand up under different potential scenarios.
Crisis management is also important because most organizations have separate teams that manage their business continuity (BC), IT disaster recovery (DR) and crisis functions yet they all need to work seamlessly together. Resiliency means “bend but don’t break”, and it entails evolving into an organization that is naturally able to adapt to adverse conditions, make midcourse corrections and elude the negative impacts of a disruption. When you consider the increasing challenges in today’s complex, global organizations, alignment between these separate groups becomes more imperative to build resiliency across the business. Now more than ever, these teams must work closely to help their organizations become more resilient and minimize the impact of any disruption to their reputation, finances, legal status, employees and customers.
RSA Archer Crisis Management
The RSA Archer Crisis Management use case addresses the problems outlined above through key features that include:
- Workflow, notifications and reporting that are integrated across BC, IT DR and crisis teams so they can better manage crisis events from start to finish
- Centralized contact and notification capabilities that can be used for communicating with key constituents before and during a crisis event
- A lessons-learned assessment that helps these integrated teams evaluate where they can improve before the next event
With RSA Archer Crisis Management, you are able to:
- Communicate more quickly and effectively, reducing lag time in assessing damage, determining safety of employees, and ascertaining status before, during and after the event
- Reduce impacts of crisis events by being better prepared for them
- Reduce downtime of critical business operations or IT systems disrupted by the crisis event by quickly activating BC/DR plans and better coordinating recovery
- Better incorporate lessons learned from tests or real crisis events back into your plans and activities, which builds resiliency into the organization
RSA Archer Crisis Management is a critical element of Integrated Risk Management. As your company drives business growth with new initiatives, technology adoption or market expansion, it becomes even more susceptible to events that could disrupt your ongoing mission. Your crisis and resiliency programs must evolve and help manage risk with more agility and integration than ever before. Managing the negative impacts of crisis events is a key ingredient to reducing risk. RSA Archer can help your organization manage multiple dimensions of risk on one configurable, integrated software platform. With RSA Archer solutions, organizations can efficiently implement risk management processes using industry standards and best practices and significantly improve their business risk management maturity.
For more information, visit RSA.com or read the Datasheet.
