Want to improve your organization's response to critical events? Uncover the essentials to creating a critical event response plan.

Given the current state of Pandemic, and the growing number of critical events year over year, it's important for corporate leadership to have an critical event response plan in place to deal with business disruptions.

When dealing with the various kinds of critical events that affect an organization each day, it's essential to have processes for analyzing critical events and making informed decisions on how to respond and mitigate them. It is also desirable for corporate leadership like CSO , CISO and CTO to have a critical event response policy to complement business continuity response procedures as defined in an Business continuity planning . This is also important from an audit perspective.

Importance of CEM to Critical event response

Many experts believe Critical Event Management platforms help organizations to orchestrate , automate response and establish communication and collaboration among team members. A CEM platform is a set of software services that monitors risk event data , correlates with assets and helps making informed decisions.

Zapoj is one such CEM platform which uses AI and machine learning to detect both physical and digital critical events , orchestrate them and automate to launch critical event response plans and provide incident analytics for postmortem analysis. Zapoj offers CEM services as SaaS based platform - Zsuite, It provides services such as Visual Risk Intelligence, Incident workflows, Mass Notifications, IT Event Management and Critical Communications to to boost the efficiency, speed and effectiveness of incident analysis, prioritization and response, as well as post-incident reporting

This article covers what are critical event response plans and key stakeholders to involve with them.

A critical event response plan (CERP) can help organizations outline instructions that help detect, respond to and limit the effects of critical event disruptions on business. The types of critical events where a CERP comes into play include Physical disruptions to organizations assets like Facilities, Vital equipment, People and digital events like data breaches,denial-of-service attacks, firewall breaches and insider threats.These sorts of critical events aren't necessarily serious disasters, but they could quickly turn into one if they're not responded to quickly and handled properly.

What is a critical event response plan?

An critical event response plan is an organized method of addressing and managing critical events. CERPs are sometimes called incident management plans or emergency management plans or Crisis management plans. Either term is acceptable, as long as the plan's composition is consistent with good critical event response practices.

Why is a critical event response plan important?

As mentioned, an critical event response plan helps reduce the effects of potential critical events, thus limiting operational, financial and reputational damage. It also lays out incident definitions, escalation requirements, personnel responsibilities, key steps to follow and people to contact in the event of an incident.

An critical event response plan establishes the recommended organization, actions and procedures needed to do the following:

• recognize and respond to an incident;
• assess the situation quickly and effectively;
• notify the appropriate individuals and organizations about the incident;
• organize a company's response, including activating a command center;
• escalate the company's response efforts based on the severity of the incident; and
• support the business recovery efforts being made in the aftermath of the incident.

The benefits of a well-crafted critical event response plan are numerous. Here are just a few:

1. Early threat detection
2. Faster Incident response
3. Better communications and collaborations among response time.
4. Standard operating procedures to follow .
5. Good business continuity .

Key stakeholders in critical event response plans

A CERP typically requires the formation of a critical event response team , which is responsible for maintaining the incident response plan. CERP members must be knowledgeable about the plan and ensure it's regularly tested and approved by management.

The response team should include key stakeholders from senior management , security and command center operations, business services owner, technical staff with platform and application expertise.

On the management side, the team should include an incident coordinator who is adept at getting team members with different perspectives, agendas and objectives to work toward common goals. There should also be a team member tasked with handling communication to and from management. This role requires a person skilled at translating technical issues into the language of the business and vice versa.

Various business service owners and business process managers throughout the organization should either be part of the CERT or be working closely with it and have input into the critical event response plan. Representatives from customer-facing parts of the business, such as sales and customer service, must also be part of the CERT. And, depending on the company's regulatory and compliance obligations, legal and public relations should also be included.