MSP Summit is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

How to Protect Customers with Critical Event Management

By Edward Gately | September 13, 2021
Crisis thermometer

Over the past 18 months, the channel has faced numerous challenges, including the COVID-19 pandemic, storms, supply chain disruptions and more.

Channel leaders must help customers protect their people and keep operations running amid all of these and future disruptions. But how do they do that?

Critical event management (CEM) technology can help protect people and assets during the next phase of the pandemic and beyond.

During this MSP Summit session, titled “How to Keep Customers Safe and Operations Running in a Post-Pandemic World,” Nov. 1, attendees will learn how innovative solutions can help determine an event’s relevance to an organization's employees, digital and physical resources and supply chain. The MSP Summit is co-located with the Channel Partners Conference & Expo, Nov. 1-4.

Speakers include: Jasmina Muller, Everbridge’s vice president of global channel partnerships; Cheryl Neal, Tech Data’s vice president of strategy and vendor acquisition; and Janet Schijns, CEO of JS Group.

In a Q&A, Schijns and Muller give a sneak peek of what they’ll share with attendees.

Channel Partners: What is CEM technology? How can it protect organizations from increasing threats?

Janet Schijns: Many businesses have emergency preparedness programs and business continuity planning, but with an ever changing and unpredictable threat environment currently, these firms need to find a way to move faster, notify quicker and take actions immediately to lower risks. Speed to evaluate, make a decision, and take action including communication of the response so that teams and customers are safe has never been more critical.

A CEM platform uses technology to take these often manual processes and automate them to speed up the time to solution. The technology is able to evaluate data, provide data intelligence, associate threats with risks by location and people, and provide the right threat assessment and appropriate remedy for minimum business disruption while still protecting people, assets and brand. As threats continue to escalate, this technology ensures that in the minute that matters an organization takes the right and best step for their particular situation.

JS Group's Janet Schijns

Jasmina Muller: We provide critical event management (CEM) software applications that automate and accelerate organizations’ operational response to critical events. We define critical events as anything that causes a disruption to an organization, whether digital, manmade or natural.

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 (ML) and automation. The Everbridge platform reaches over 800 million people in more than 200 countries and territories.

Everbridge's Jasmina Muller

CP: Does critical event management technology present new opportunities for channel partners? If so, can you give some examples?

JS: Yes, CEM is a new and bright opportunity for channel partners, who are often tasked with part of the emergency response (as an example security breaches, network hacks, etc), but may not today be a critical member of the emergency response team for their customers. The CEM offer allows them to venture into new business dialogues with their customers, including what technology spends are needed in data, analytics, video, security and cloud to ensure that their client can gather and react to a critical event.

This positions the partner to be a trusted adviser to their clients in a time in our market that is currently very chaotic. This enables them to be a resource for their customer to manage the risks and thus positions them beyond the standard partner relationship. Some examples include COVID-19 health alerts to change business rules on the fly, business closures based on weather or extreme civil unrest keeping employees out of harm’s way, re-routing materials and goods based on conditions.

JM: Yes. Over the years, we have significantly broadened our capabilities to meet our customers’ life safety, operational resilience, supply chain and IT alerting needs. … Providing these solutions to end users represents a few of the opportunities we have to work together.

CP: How can channel partners automate action to mitigate threats, track progress and analyze performance to improve future response?

JS: The CEM platforms in the market are the key to automating from risk to threats, to process and provide rich data for analyzing outcomes and improving future response. Every partner who is acting as a solution or business advisor to their clients should have at least one CEM in their solution offer and they should take advantage of the current risk-rich environment to set up meetings with clients and prospects to show them what is possible when you have a CEM platform in place.

JM: A CEM platform uses technology to take manual processes and automate them. Amplifying data feeds to provide richer intelligence and correlating threats with locations of assets and people, ensuring more rapid and comprehensive incident assessment and remediation.

CP: What do you hope attendees can learn and make use of from your session?

JS: Understand the risk-rich current environment, recognize that CEM is a critical technology tool in the business and government space, develop basic knowledge of options, and build a plan to offer CEM to clients (for vendors adding it to their bundles, for partners adding it to their offers).

JM: Attendees will learn more about CEM, and how to foster enterprise resilience to confront both current and future digital and physical critical events. 

Tags:
critical event management, Janet Schijns