Crises Control offers Cutting Edge, Unified, Crisis Management and Disaster Recovery Management in One Platform
This week HSE People is speaking with Shalen Sehgal, CEO of Crises Control about disaster management.
Can you tell our members a little bit about Crises Control?
Crises Control makes sending out mass notifications to large groups of people smooth and easy, and improves incident management for organisations all around the world.
Whatever the announcement or the incident, whether you need to mobilise your response teams, or notify your employees or the general public, the Crises Control platform provides reliable service, two way communication, geo location, live tracking and progress reports and more.
What do you see as some of the impending challenges faced by your clients in the Disaster Management space and how does Crises Control address these challenges with your cutting-edge offerings?
Critical events happen anywhere, any time. Every incident is unique, but what they have in common is that they can seriously impact an organisation’s people and operations – especially if they are not responded to properly.
Our customers face several key challenges:
- Increased reliance on IT – but IT services are often seriously impacted by incidents, which means that they need to have a system that sits outside their main IT stack. Crises Control does just that.
- Cyber attacks – cyber attacks are fast becoming one of the most common forms of incident that our customers face. Once IT security is compromised, IT may become entirely non-operational, and concern about security becomes paramount. Crises Control offers a secure platform outside the company’s main IT stack where the response team can manage the recovery effort.
- Dispersed attacks – again incidents are no longer tied to physical space, they can take place in cyberspace, impacting offices in locations as distant from each other as Singapore, New York, and London (no specific company in mind). In addition, the response team might be equally dispersed. Crises Control is fully hosted in the cloud, which means that teams who are geographically distant can be united on the CC dashboard, which updates in real time.
Can you shed some light on how your mass notification technique is changing the way enterprises manage and defend disasters.
The Crises Control platform offers so much more than merely communications. The incident management platform helps organisations optimise their critical event response by orchestrating crisis activities, teams, resources and communications… all in one central location.
The platform as a whole is a virtual command centre, providing the ability for enterprises to reach all members of their response teams allowing the distribution of tasks from your incident response plans saved in the platform. Individuals can be added or removed from the incident response team dynamically based on their location.
How does your solution give the right message to the right people at the right time.
Communication with any number of stakeholders is important, and Crises Control contains several features for ensuring that the right message is delivered to the right people at the right time:
- Multi-channel delivery – enterprises can define how the message will be sent out (email, voice call, SMS, push notification). Crises Control will continue to run through all defined delivery options until the user has received the message.
- Templates – enterprises can create template messages ahead of time that can be sent out in seconds once an incident has been identified. These templates save crucial time, even if it is a placeholder message. Template messages can be saved by topic and for defined recipients ahead of time,
- Groups – enterprises can set up groups of different stakeholders, and assign template messages to groups. This enables the response team to ensure that the right message reaches the right group. For example, the employee group in Singapore may need to receive a message to stay away from the office, while the employee group in New York may be told that it is business as usual. Or a media group could be set up to enable the response team to send out unified messaging that is safe for public consumption.
- Social media plug-in – Crises Control can be linked to social media accounts for public updates quickly and effectively from the same platform as the entire response.
- Availability – Crises Control is a cloud-based SaaS platform. We assure 99.95% availability ensuring that messaging can be delivered any time.
I see from my research that your management application helps achieve faster and transparent communication? Also, how does it improve the effectiveness of crisis response.
Clear communication is vital for an effective crisis response. Crises Control puts clear, transparent communication at the centre of the entire platform. This includes:
- Two way messaging – teams can communicate with each other both individually, and in groups.
- Video calling and conference bridge – Crises Control offers secure video conference calling through the conference bridge.
- Task manager – the incident response manager can assign tasks for individual members of the incident response team, and record the progress of each task. The entire team can see the status of any task at any time, thereby understanding what progress has been made. The task manager can be predefined with generic tasks, or updated on the fly to provide an easy reference for team members to know what to do next.
- Activity logs – all activities carried out through Crises Control are recorded, so the response team can see who has messaged who, which messages were sent to employees, which task was finished, and when, and so on.
With so many companies vying for the top position in the Disaster Management solution provider’s domain today, could you briefly explain how Crises Control stands a mile ahead from the competition in the market?
Crises Control is a flexible disaster management tool that can be configured to users’ particular needs. Every element of Crises Control has been configured to meet the demands of disaster management, utilising the newest technologies to provide our services. It is also cloud based, hosted in different availability zones around the world, ensuring real time service no matter where the team is. Crises Control also offers high availability (99.95%)
The Crises Control is modular, enabling customers to choose the features they adopt based on their current requirements. Some of the highlights include:
- Integrations with other IT systems across the organisation (for example, Microsoft Active Directory)
- Multi-channel notifications
- Social media integrations
- Coordinated communication and management – ensuring that the entire incident response effort takes place on one platform and is recorded in one place
- An employee SOS button – an instant alert for any employee who feels unsafe, no matter where they are in the world
- Task manager – allocate owners for each task and set timelines and escalation paths for those tasks that are not accepted or completed the defined times
- Audit and post-event reporting functionalities – all activities are logged and can be exported for audit and reporting requirements
- Live dashboard – a complete view of the incident including incident location, communication channels used, messages, critical task status, relevant documents and plans for this incident, and the location of people throughout the entire incident.
Do you have a case study that you can share with our members?
I do, as you can imagine its quite a large file so please follow the link here – Oil and Gas Industry Critical Incident Notification Solution Case Study.
Thank you so much for your time and insight Shalen. You can find out more about Crises Control on their website – Crisis Management Software | Critical Event Management (crises-control.com)
