Around the world today critical events are on the rise disrupting businesses, their people and revenue streams. A recent ransomware study by SonicWall cited 2021 as the worst year they have ever recorded for such attacks, representing a 148% increase compared to the year prior. A rash of severe weather events cost the U.S. $145 billion last year and set new records, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and organizations continue to confront challenges brought on by a lingering pandemic. These and other disruptions have led senior leaders across categories to investigate new ways to build resilience against the evolving threat landscape.
Fortunately, digital transformation – and more specifically, critical event management (CEM) technology – offers hope for a more resilient future and more effective ways for enterprises to confront a multitude of threats and thrive. Unlike outdated methods of responding to a crisis, such as phone trees and manuals, CEM provides businesses with sophisticated, automated software solutions to protect the things they care about from the things they worry about and keep revenue flowing.
CEM works by allowing leaders to assess risks and determine which are relevant to their assets and people; locate all assets and people that are impacted or at risk of being impacted, including remote, work-from-home, mobile and traveling employees, as well customers and responders, who are near or traveling to areas of risk; act to automate standard operating procedures to launch and manage incident response; and analyze performance to identify bottlenecks and improve response for subsequent events.
Founded in 2002, Everbridge leads the CEM category with a mission of keeping people safe and organizations running, faster. Over 6,000 global customers, including Lowe’s, Goldman Sachs, and Dow, rely on Everbridge in anticipation of, or amid, critical events. Everbridge’s solution leverages tens of thousands of continually updated risk data elements — all curated through a “single pane of glass” visualization, combined with machine learning and automation.
As the industry leader, Everbridge offers a range of CEM solutions for the most common use cases, ranging from Digital
Operations and Smart Security to Business Operations and People Resilience. The company even offers a Public Safety solution to protect whole populations.
As organizations continue to emerge from the pandemic and confront new work trends, they will face growing expectations to fulfil their duty of care to their employees wherever they go (whether in-office, remote or traveling). They will also need to guard their people and assets against various rising digital, natural, and human caused threats, and as critical events often occur simultaneously, the future will require much more sophisticated and rapid responses to such disruptions. The question leaders need to ask themselves and their teams is if they are ready to confront them.
While critical events show no sign of abating, CEM represents a powerful tool for fostering lasting enterprise resilience and a competitive advantage. CEM can mean the difference between a thriving business, or one that struggles to keep up with a challenging and often unpredictable business environment.
Vernon Irvin serves as Co-CEO & Chief Revenue Officer at Everbridge, the global leader in Critical Event Management (CEM), with the mission of keeping people safe and organizations running faster. He leads the global go-to-market and services organizations and strategy responsible for driving the company’s enterprise transition with its market-leading CEM product suite, as well as global adoption for Everbridge’s countrywide Public Warning solution. Vernon brings over 30 years of enterprise and SaaS sales leadership experience across direct and channel organizations serving both public and private sectors at multi-billion-dollar scale. He has led enterprise sales organizations covering 60 countries, leveraging indirect channels, partners and alliances to grow deal flow and book orders.
