What is Situational Awareness?
Situational awareness is one of the top responsibilities for security teams, emergency managers, enterprise risk management teams of all kinds. Achieving situational awareness involves perceiving potential threats by gathering intelligence, analyzing it, and having an informed response that addresses the risk.
Why Situational Awareness is Important
Situational awareness enables effective response, mitigates risk, and ultimately protects an organization’s operations, assets, and people.
What situational awareness means in practice can vary depending on the context. For organizations like hospitals, it can mean tracking any event or risk that could threaten hospital patients and staff or cause a mass casualty incident. For a logistics company, it could mean monitoring geopolitics and shipping routes. For a tech company, it could mean keeping tens of thousands remote team members safe from a wide variety of threats.
Ultimately, awareness is crucial for organizations across the board.
Situational Awareness in Critical Event Management
Nearly 60% of American workers have faced a dangerous situation or emergency in their work environment at some time in their careers. These emergencies - or critical events - can range from natural disasters, public health emergencies, fires, workplace violence, and civil unrest. Critical Event Management (CEM) platforms are used to help guide an organization’s strategy and process to tackle these emergencies and keep people safe from potential hazards as well as the organization from liability, brand damage, and other disruptions.
A good CEM platform should have robust tools to help organizations detect emergencies, respond, and assess their performance with after action reports.
Three Steps To Achieving Situational Awareness
Detection Situational awareness begins with detecting and recognizing people, events, and risk factors that could pose a threat. Organizations cannot respond to threats they’re unaware of and require robust processes and technology to detect threats quickly. These can range from internal camera systems, proper reporting structure from internal personnel, and intelligence gathering tools that see outside the four walls of facilities.
Analysis Once detection systems are in place, the amount of signals coming in can be overwhelming. In addition to the volume of data coming in, data often needs to be verified or further investigated before being escalated. In order for raw data to become actionable intelligence, a process for analyzing new information needs to be in place.
Response Response to critical events ought to be timely in order to minimize damage to organizations. Protocols can be incredibly complex depending on the event. Rather than force unnecessary decision making hectic situations, response playbooks should be well-defined and rehearsed well-before emergencies occur. Critical event management platforms and other technologies should also be utilized to ensure every decision maker is fully informed for effective decision making.
The Best All-In-One Situational Awareness + Critical Event Management Platform
Critical events can happen at any time, but fast responses with effective tooling can help mitigate and avoid disaster.
Beakon is an all-in-one critical event management platform that leverages the most powerful threat detection technologies with the intuitive analysis and response systems optimized for user-friendliness and ease of adoption.
Beakon helps teams detect critical events that go undetected by other tools. Critical events are also detected on average 4 hours faster than other sources, leading to improved risk mitigation outcomes.
Protect your organization from risk with Beakon today.
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