What is Critical Event Management (CEM)?

A critical event is anything that poses a threat to an organization and its employees. A few examples of critical events are severe weather conditions, fires, workplace violence and equipment failure.

Critical events can occur at any time. Therefore, enterprises should adopt a proactive approach to effectively handle them. Critical Event Management (CEM) enables enterprises to use technology to respond quickly to critical events.

The CEM strategy adopted by many medium to large-scale enterprises continues to lack in several aspects that could otherwise help minimize damages. A recent Forrester study has found that over 30% of enterprises with a CEM strategy still don’t have vital tools for crisis management, integrated alarm notifications, social media monitoring and business continuity planning. This statistic indicates that enterprises need a robust CEM system, which can help security administrators assess and respond to threats proactively.

This article will help you understand how Genea’s integration with the Topo.ai CEM platform enables enterprises to proactively respond to critical events and minimize damages.

Are you seeking the best security solution for your enterprise, hotel, commercial real estate building or hospital? Look no further than Genea’s cloud-based access control solutions to simplify security.

The Importance of Critical Event Management

Critical events have been on the rise for the last few years. For instance, the National Fire Prevention Association (NFPA) reported that the fire department had responded to over 1.31 million fires in the United States alone. This number could have been much lower if enterprises, commercial real estate properties, hotels, hospitals, schools and residential apartments had a CEM platform integrated with an access control system. Together, these systems would trigger fire alarms, send notifications of fire on the dashboard and open emergency doors automatically.

Buildings of all types should implement an appropriate CEM platform because it:

  • Reduces the time to respond to critical events.
  • Creates an accurate model of the threats.
  • Lowers the costs of IT outages.
  • Decreases the losses that could occur due to property damage.
  • Protects people from incidents such as fire, active shootings and earthquakes.

The survival of an enterprise depends on its organizational resilience. Organizational resilience is the preparedness of an enterprise to anticipate and respond to a sudden or incremental change. The Federal Reserve reported that over 200,000 establishments above historical levels have closed their operations permanently due to the impact of the first wave of COVID-19.  The main reason for this massive business closure is a lack of organizational resilience. A good CEM platform helps enterprises achieve organizational resilience by effectively handling critical events.

The Genea Integration with Topo.ai Critical Event Management Platform

TopoONE is a leading CEM platform helping security teams manage risk to their physical assets.

It assimilates intelligence and asset information from a wide range of sources, which includes people, external feeds and internal systems for situational awareness and coordinated responses. For instance, it will collect data from external feeds such as threat intelligence, weather stations, natural disaster recovery agencies and traffic to understand the potential impacts of external threats to operations.

TopoONE is known for its ease of use, a high degree of self-configuration, and AI-driven automation.  It enables enterprises to choose signals they want to monitor and automate those signals to provide situational awareness by ingesting threat intelligence from the desired source.

Communication is vital while managing critical events. TopoONE enables enterprises to have seamless access to all preferred communication channels. This facilitates quick communication with impacted parties. For instance, enterprises can integrate all their communication channels, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, emails and messengers send mass notifications to impacted stakeholders.

TopoONE can also be integrated with physical security systems and access control tools to protect assets with accelerated emergency response times. For instance, you can integrate TopoONE with Genea’s cloud-based access control system with a simple API token to accurately assess and respond to security threats.

The main benefits of integrating Genea’s access control with TopoONE are:

  • Total oversight of the physical security across all properties worldwide.
  • Add or remove users, monitor access activities and respond to emergencies from a global dashboard.
  • Populate door alerts, including forced doors and held doors on the TopoONE dashboard.
  • Assign access keys in any form, including mobile credentials, physical key fobs, and smart cards, to restrict unauthorized people from entering the building and causing harm to others.
  • The flexibility of non-proprietary hardware ensures you never get locked to the contract.
  • Bookmark your vulnerable locations for constant monitoring on the global dashboard.  

Build Organizational Resilience with Genea’s Integrated Access Control

TopoONE is one such tool that helps security team members quickly identify threats, automate workflows, communicate rapidly with impacted parties, escalate emerging threats, and build dashboards or reports for informed decision-making.

Genea’s integration with TopoONE will cater to your physical security needs while proactively responding to critical events. Genea’s integrated access control system will provide a detailed view of what is happening at the building’s access points in real time and notify security administrators of incidents such as forced door attempts and doors being held open. These real-time alerts reduce the incident response time significantly and help organizations protect their people and assets.

Genea’s integrated access control will also help design custom door plans to strategically implement lockdowns or keep doors open during emergencies.

  • Lockdowns: Security teams can choose doors to be closed automatically and implement the lockdown plan when an active shooter is on the premises with a single click of a button from a remote location.
  • Emergencies: Security teams can choose doors to be opened automatically and implement the emergency exit plan during critical events such as fires, earthquakes, and hazardous gas leakages with a mouse click.   

Leaders across industries choose Genea to meet their physical security needs because of:

  • Live 24/7/365 customer support.
  • Automatic upgrades that make the software future-proof.
  • Mobile and physical credential choices.

Want to try it for yourself? Schedule a demo to learn more about how Genea’s integration with TopoONE can improve the organizational resilience of your business.