The good news is that the PagerDuty Operations Cloud can support your Crisis Response Management Operations for those next level threats. We know this because it’s what we use to manage the unpredictability of the global operating environment and to keep our employees safe.

In this blog, we cover the evolving nature of global preparedness and the convergence of threats along with how you can enhance your crisis response management operations with PagerDuty.

We’re not in Kansas Anymore

PagerDuty runs an annual Global Preparedness campaign to provide its employees with the tools and resources they need to be resilient in a rapidly changing world. We want our employees globally to establish best in class personal and professional resilience so we can do our very best work in support of our customers. We do this by enabling our employees to act in moments of crisis. Throughout September, we deliver emergency response guides, CPR-certification classes, emerging threat training sessions and disaster response movie trivia. Our customary volunteering opportunity in partnership with our Social Impact team and our crisis response system tests followed by a functional drill are mainstays in our annual programming.

Business leaders should always plan for the company’s worst day before it becomes a reality and because we’re anticipating that future crises will require more complex responses and tools to resolve, we’re also highlighting perfect storm scenarios across categories of threats during this year’s campaign. For example, the intensity of cyber threats and extreme natural disasters that we’re seeing over the last year or so creates an opportunity to examine the effectiveness of our crisis response management operations against combined threats. 

One thing is certain when keeping in mind Murphy’s Law: if a crisis can happen, it will happen. However, it may not happen the traditional way you planned and prepared for it. In other words, buckle up because Kansas is no more.

PagerDuty for PagerDuty

PagerDuty’s Crisis Response Management Operations Guide was built to showcase how PagerDuty uses PagerDuty. In regards to preparedness, we leverage our platform for periodic functional exercises and crisis simulations to ensure our teams are ready as we scan the horizon for emerging threats. After these exercises or simulations, we complete our postmortems (i.e., after action report or hotwash) in the platform capitalizing on all of the “Incident Action Plan” information both we and the system captured/generated during the simulated response, i.e., timeline of events, responder requests, hand-off times, status updates, notes.

For operational resilience, when we do need to respond to a critical event, the operations side just works. Using PagerDuty, we don’t have to worry about contact information being out of date, which conference bridge we should be using and where the latest version of our playbook is stored. These problems slow mean time to respond and ultimately the speed at which a critical event can be resolved. PagerDuty supports 700+ native integrations and even more with our API so we never miss a notification or need to spend time punching in conference call numbers on a dialpad. With the ability to add documentation links into our services, our plans and playbooks also never get lost.

At PagerDuty, we’re empowering teams to build the future and using our own platform to respond to the increasingly complex crises that threaten our people and operations. If you want to learn how PagerDuty can help you modernize your crisis response management operations, read our Crisis Response Management Ops Guide and sign up for a free trial.

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PagerDuty operates around the world and around the clock so our 24×7 operation to keep Dutonians safe starts by enabling every employee through training, knowledge-sharing and effective tools so they can take action. Global Preparedness Month is our World Cup of employee safety where we bring all of our enablement activities home. It’s interactive, cross-functional, fun and endorsed by our Senior Leadership. 

In this blog, we’ll cover how we prepare our teams for disaster and how we use PagerDuty internally for our “Harden the Target” initiative aimed at addressing the gaps in critical physical security events in the hybridized world.

Orchestrating in real-time with PagerDuty

When facing a critical breach or outage in physical security systems, teams need to understand the where and when in real-time. Let’s face it, humans can’t monitor multiple, concurrent critical physical security events as well as machines. Applying the principles of digital operations with real-time alerting and automation is key to better insights and actionable information. PagerDuty’s capabilities help us do just this and also serve as a force multiplier.

We found that consolidating on the PagerDuty platform gives us a more thorough common operating picture to respond to critical events as they unfold across different crisis response and physical security systems. A 1:1 relationship between our configured services and our critical physical security event types gives us increased visibility to what is happening and decreases our mean time to respond to or interrupt potentially harmful activity. The platform’s machine learning and intelligent grouping capabilities give us additional intel for trend and pattern recognition such as repeated failed access attempts or the frequency of equipment outages.

This use case layers physical security management best practices and FEMA’s Area Command over PagerDuty’s traditional incident response. This setup acts as our virtual Global Security Operations Center (GSOC). PagerDuty’s 650+ integrations (e.g., Slack, Teams, Zoom, etc.), email clients and API ensure that we can ingest crucial event information from virtually any physical security, threat intelligence or status monitoring system, and do something timely with that data.

Through the platform, we can orchestrate alerts to response teams, set off audible alarms for our staff or run automated response plays for contract security teams using third party video analytics. PagerDuty ensures a critical physical security event does not go unnoticed and escalates to the right team at the right time.

Practice keeps us primed for response

Throughout September, we engage our employees with emergency preparedness activities such as weekly educational themes, volunteer activities in partnership with PD.org and gamification like building your best-looking disaster kit or our disaster movie trivia. #stayready is our running theme and getting our workforce ready to respond to a major natural disaster such as an earthquake or a man-made disaster such as an active shooter event is our focal point. We also look to have some fun together and pick up key learnings from each other. 

We’re running systems tests and drills to lock in those response habits with our emergency communications tests and The Great ShakeOut earthquake drill all while coordinating on the PagerDuty platform. Through this process we keep our on call schedules up to date and use the on-call readiness tool to confirm everyone is set up for time sensitive alerts as Incident Commanders. The end result is captured in post-mortems and ensures that our team activations, incident command and escalation protocols are correctly programmed in the platform and continue to reflect the needs of the evolving threat landscape.At PagerDuty, we’re empowering teams to build the future and with our platform configured for critical physical security events, we’ve got another tool in our toolbox to stay ahead of the emerging threats to our people and business. If you want to learn how PagerDuty can help your organization respond to the many threats posed by bad actors and serve as a force multiplier or as your virtual Global Security Operations Center (GSOC), please sign up for a free trial.

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