The Business Continuity Institute’s (BCI’s) recent ‘Emergency and Crisis Communications Report’ examined how crisis communication methods have evolved over the past decade in response to changes in working habits, the impact of new technologies, and shifting privacy policies, while identifying best-practice for deploying an emergency or crisis communications plan and considers how communication protocols can be improved.
The changing landscape – SaaS usage at an all-time high
The report noted that the last four years saw a shift in emergency and crisis communications strategies in the wake of the pandemic and the impact of remote/hybrid working. Notably, organisations are still tackling the challenges of alerting a dispersed workforce, as well as ensuring that training and exercising is engaging and effective.
It’s no surprise to BICSI members that there has been a significant shift in the technologies used in emergency and crisis communications. With increased security protocols now attached to cloud solutions, coupled with faster and more reliant network capabilities, organisations are shifting to the cloud. The report acknowledged this trend, while highlighting how the use of software-as-a-service (SaaS) in emergency communications is at an all-time high.
The popularity of SaaS solutions lies in the ability to be deployed across multiple platforms at once, as well as being hosted remotely in the cloud — a particular advantage for those organizations with staff working remotely.
The hybrid option of having a SaaS solution integrated with existing technologies is becoming increasingly popular. This is because organizations seek to adjust their toolkits to keep existing software but layer a new SaaS solution into it to provide enhanced crisis capabilities.
What matters to organisations
There is an increasing level of dissatisfaction among organisations towards emergency and communications tools (20.3% in 2024, up from 16.2% in 2023). The report cited the need for better integration with other alerting scenarios (48.3%), lack of functionality (31.6%), and affordability (19.3%) as the primary factors.
In terms of functionality, the report evaluated which features were most significant to organisations. Collaborative functionality is now considered the most important feature in an emergency communications tool with 54.6% of respondents deeming it to be a critical requirement — demonstrating how collaboration at the onset of a crisis is crucial, in order to ensure that the right people are informed, the correct information is obtained, and, where appropriate, management are consulted first.
Activating the plan
There has been an increase in the number of organisations that have activated their emergency communications plans, with almost 65% ( up from 60% in 2023) activating plans between one and five times in the last year. Extreme weather events were the most popular cause of activation at 48.3%, which is likely to remain the case over the mid- to long-term given the severity of climate change events.
The speed of activation is paramount for a successful emergency response and most organizations can activate their plan within the first hour of an incident. Furthermore, 70% of activations met the organisation’s expected response level.
The human factor is a critical element in the success of emergency response. Similar to last year’s report, the primary reason given for a plan failure was a lack of response to emergency messages by recipients. However, this is an area that can be improved through training and exercising programs. Notably, the report did highlight a positive 10-year trend in the number of organisations engaging in regular training, which has now reached a record high at 79.3% (up from 68.4% last year).
This year’s data has shown a notable shift from previous years, demonstrating a greater awareness among practitioners of the problems associated with network outages, as well as a palpable need to address them with back-up solutions. It was observed that practitioners are also more pragmatic when faced with budget issues by either exploiting existing enterprise tools or investing in specialist solutions that interact with existing solutions. Such technologies not only help with cost but, by using a known interface, help to ensure that a tool can be used quickly and efficiently when a crisis hits.