In today’s hyper-connected age, cyberattacks are often one of the most disruptive and jarring events for a company. Every company has precious and sensitive data on their digital devices and cloud services, and having that data attacked and compromised can lead to disastrous consequences if companies aren’t prepared.
The internal staff who are responsible for maintaining a company’s security should already understand that data breaches and cyberattacks are already normal. So while the ideal goal can be prevention, the realistic goal should always be mitigating damage and returning to normal operations as soon as possible.
This is where critical event management methods come in. Using these methods, security professionals can have critical event management solutions to fall back on during the event of a cyberattack and use those solutions to foster a situation where the organization is back on its feet and returning to normal operations with as little downtime as possible.
What is Digital Critical Event Management?
Critical event management is commonly defined as the method to rapidly create and communicate a proper response to emergencies such as cyberattacks, natural disasters, and terrorist attacks.
In the digital sense, this can pertain to internet outages, service disruptions, and cyberattacks by malicious parties. Recovery with critical event management depends on creating a plan beforehand about how to transmit and receive secure communications between personnel in the organization, mitigating damage to company property such as devices and software, and reducing the data lost to hackers and attackers.
To speed up recovery, these steps must be done with a plan in mind. Here are the steps you should be following.
- Assess the damage
- Locate personnel and company property
- Create solution
- Analyse efficacy
- Gather perspective
- Communicate next steps
#1. Assess the Damage:
This is the step where you find out what transpired during the cyberattack. What kind of attack was launched on your system? What did the attackers want? What did they take? How much damage have they done? Who was affected in your company? These are the questions that you should be asking so you can get a clear picture of what has transpired and what your next steps are to mitigate the damage and get back to normal operations.
#2. Locate Personnel and Company Property:
After assessing the damage, the next order of business would be to find your key personnel needed to mitigate the damage, from impacted individuals to security and IT personnel who can get you up and running again. Additionally, you’ll also need to locate the systems and property that were compromised, as well as narrow down on internal digital infrastructure that can help you reduce the damage of the events that have transpired, such as security devices and communication channels that you can use to talk to the organization without any risk of being tampered with.
n their paper The Business Evolution: From Incident Management to Critical Event Management, authors from Enterprise Management Associates, an industry analyst and consulting firm, but more of a point on it:
#3. Create Solution:
This is where you and the organization decide on the steps to be taken and critical event management methods to be implemented to respond to the cyberattack.
It is also the step where you decide on when the response should be deployed. Often, it’s not just about the immediate nature of the response, but also how coordinated it is. A cyberattack can be disruptive in many ways to many employees, so creating a plan where people are also educated as to what to do and where to expect clear and accurate instructions for mitigation and recovery is important.
#4. Analyse Efficacy:
This is where you and the rest of the critical event management solutions team should be reviewing how effective your response methods and solutions are. Did your steps do enough to protect company data and property? Were you able to communicate clearly with employees? Were there any major bottlenecks? Which tasks and solutions took too long? What was missing from this response?
These are all questions that you should be asking so that you’re better prepared in the future so that in the future, recovery with critical event management is even faster than before.
#5. Gather Perspective:
Gather data on what the important components were in your critical event management plan. Who were the key players? What solutions will be most effective? Is there anything from your perspective that you missed out on?
Gathering perspectives from various sources, including employees who are affected by the cyberattack, can help you understand where your current response methods fell short.
#6. Communicate Next Steps:
This is the final step where you keep all stakeholders and employees affected by the cyberattack informed and ready to move on to what needs to be done to get back to operational normalcy.
This communication ensures that employees are all working towards the same goal and they understand what their roles are when it comes to damage mitigation and recovery after a cyberattack.
Conclusion
A cyberattack is never a scenario any organization wants to find itself at the centre of. But in today’s hyper-connected age, this is becoming an all-too-common scenario. So, preparation for damage reduction and loss mitigation is the best case situation for organizations and their stakeholders.
Critical event management methods can help with quick recovery and rapid return to normalcy. This ensures that companies don’t flounder on what to do next and how to protect their assets, operations, and employees.
