Last week, in Part 1 of this series, we briefly covered how two critical trends are shaping the way that organizations effectively communicate during all types of operational and emergency situations. Let’s dig in with two more, as we wrap up our look ahead to 2015 (and beyond).
Security, Privacy, Confidentiality: Doesn’t it seem like security risks and compliance mandates arise just as quickly as new products comes to market? This is particularly true in the mobile space, where security and privacy are significant technology drivers. Given this, as well as the continued proliferation of BYOD, more organizations are leveraging new tools to effectively manage mobile devices and applications to ensure the proper security, privacy and compliance safeguards are in place.
This is by no means a new trend, but is also one that continues to evolve as businesses seek new ways empower their workforce while protecting them from themselves (accidental or purposeful leaks of sensitive information), or from espionage from outsiders. Secure mobile communications—particularly between employees, is a particularly important trend in healthcare, where HIPAA-compliance is imperative (and exactly why Everbridge recently launched our new solution, HipaaChat). Other industries, including financial services and utilities, face similar compliance and security-related employee communications challenges.
Connecting Devices, People AND Things: Imagine if your local community’s water dam was connected to a critical communication system. Now imagine that every time that it needed to be released, the system would automatically trigger a notification to the public works department to enable them to take the appropriate action. The “what if” question about “smart dams” is short-sighted. We are already there, and we are only getting started. Our system, for instance, interacts with devices, people and things equally, and will trigger critical communications based on such indicators as appropriate location and situation. Depending on the severity of a situation, and whether the incident was first reported by people, sensors or devices (“Internet of Things”), our system will always ensure that the right messages get sent to the right people, based on their location, skill sets or simply, their ability to respond.
Our IT Alerting product is another great example of this connection between people, processes and things— the solution uses email ingestion and automatic escalation of alerts, on-call scheduling and mobile alerting to automate communications to the right IT staff, keeping them informed of incidents, at all times, and on all devices.
That is my take for several of our key items of focus for 2015. What is your list? I would love to hear from you. Again, just find me on Twitter, @Jbenanto.
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