Secure Your Organization’s Last Line of Defense with Effective Crisis Communication

No organization is completely safe from cyber attacks and data breaches, unfortunately! When disaster strikes, organizations better be prepared to address and mitigate the crisis as quickly as possible. This can only be achieved by having an effective crisis communication**** plan in place to help you with cyber-related and non-cyber related crisis.

Why is Crisis Communication useful?

During cyber incidents such as data breaches, ransomware attacks, network breaches etc., organizations need to contact each and every employee (or employees in selected teams and departments depending on the impact) to check whether or not their systems, company’s confidential data and personal information are impacted. Having a stringent plan allows incident response teams to follow a set protocol aimed at containing and mitigating the issue at hand.

In fact, it is essential that organizations implement crisis communication as part of their disaster recovery plans. Not just cyber incidents, this feature can also help enterprises in the event of natural disasters, theft of systems, theft of identities and other external crisis.

For instance, consider a scenario where a cyber attack has targeted your organization’s network systems resulting in network outages. Your customers are unable to login and access services. In such scenarios, having a stringent crisis communication plan in place helps you organize and streamline response and restoration.

From sending crisis notifications and alerts to employees, business partners, vendors and customers, to instructing your PR team on how to disclose details of the attack to the public - a holistic crisis communication plan should cover it all easily and seamlessly.

Keeping the necessities in mind, Cyware has included several niche features to its Cyware Situational Awareness Platform (CSAP) that help you carry out crisis communication in various forms.

How does CSAP facilitate crisis communication?

CSAP allows organizations to send mass alerts to all employees in the event of emergency. Once, the incident response team has completed its assessment and determined that employees must be notified, the emergency notification alert is launched to take notes.

Data of members who cannot be reached and who haven’t responded to the alert is immediately sent back to the incident response team for further follow-up. An alert can also be rescheduled to reach the members who have not responded. Consequently, employees can be made aware of the crisis in a well planned, systemic manner without wasting precious time.

This feature can also be used to gather valuable intelligence at the root level. Once sufficient data is collected, a coordinated recovery and response strategy can be formulated to contain the disaster. With CSAP, your incident response teams and SecOps team can coordinate and share recovery plans to all or a subset of employees depending on the team, geolocation, designation etc.