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In today’s fast-paced risk landscape, timely incident response is crucial for minimising the impact of incidents, maintaining business continuity and preserving the trust of staff and customers. Automation can play a significant role in accelerating response, enabling teams to react swiftly and efficiently to potential risks and confirmed incidents.
As risks to employee safety and business continuity continue to rise, being prepared for emergencies is crucial. Automation can handle increased safety threats by continuously monitoring for potential hazards and initiating predefined response protocols. This not only ensures a rapid response but also frees up your team to focus on other critical tasks, enhancing overall efficiency.
Here’s how automation can enhance your incident response strategy and learn how our customers have mastered this.
Streamlining detection and incident creation
3rd party systems that generate alarms, detect anomalies or potential threats can automatically generate incident reports in real-time without human intervention and with far greater speed and accuracy than manual methods.
Customer example: The world’s largest manned guarding company uses verified threat intelligence for automated alerts covering protests, terrorism, major crime, and transport disruptions, mapping these around its London clients to streamline reporting and notify on-site security teams.
Rapid triage and prioritisation
When an incident is generated, automation can help triage incidents by assessing the severity and potential impact. Automated incident prioritisation ensures that the most critical threats are addressed first, reducing the time it takes for teams to respond to high-risk incidents.
Customer example: The UK’s largest home improvement company uses automated triage and task prioritisation for their crime centre team, based on geographic location, specialist skills (e.g., fraud, organised crime), and criticality from automated severity and priority levels.
Accelerated containment and mitigation
Once an incident is identified, automation can facilitate rapid containment and mitigation. Automated standard or emergency operating procedures with pre-configured tasks, priority, response deadline enables teams to provide a swift and resilient response to help limit the spread of the threat and mitigate damage.
Customer example: One of the UK’s largest skyscrapers uses automated SOPs/EOPs to accelerate containment and mitigation during all types of incidents such as lift entrapments, where the platform swiftly notifies engineers and emergency responders with pre-configured protocols based on if there are any injuries, severe sense of panic or life threatening conditions. In addition, Gold Command is automatically notified on critical incidents and follow-up contractor SLA investigation and management team debrief reports are also scheduled and mandated.
Enhanced communication and coordination
Automation can enhance communication and coordination within the incident response team and with external stakeholders. Automated notifications and updates keep everyone informed about the status of an incident, ensuring a cohesive and organised response effort. Additionally, automated reporting tools can generate detailed incident reports for regulatory compliance and post-incident analysis.
Customer example: The UK’s largest TV studios and tech hub uses automated communications to notify specific teams on a wide range of different incidents based on impact, providing an efficient incident response and coordination – improving security, safety and operational continuity.
Integration with access control systems
Automated integration with access control systems allows for the detection of people within the gate line, providing a count of total people at risk. It can also determine who needs to be notified and when, ensuring timely and targeted communication during an incident.
Customer example: A premium office space in London utilises an automated integration with their Building Management Systems, Smart Spaces, to keep staff and occupier emergency contact details up-to-date and enabling notifications to contacts swiped into the building.
Geo-spatial alerts
Automated geo-spatial radius alerts can notify individuals in a specific area about potential threats. This feature is crucial for ensuring the safety of personnel in the vicinity of an incident and for coordinating evacuation or other safety measures.
Customer example: The City of London Police use automated geo-targeted alerts to send incident notifications, updates, and briefings to different clusters, sectors, and contact groups, ensuring timely and relevant information reaches the right personnel for efficient response.
Smart deployment
Automation can facilitate the smart deployment of personnel based on their skills, location, and role. This ensures that the right resources are dispatched to the right place at the right time, enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of the incident response.
Customer example: A British multinational retailer uses automated smart deployment to effectively allocate Store Detectives for security and loss prevention, ensuring personnel are deployed based on historical trend data, location, and impact, enhancing store safety and reducing theft.
Configurable colour-coding
Configurable and automated colour-coding of incidents as they are reported assigns colours to rows and/or columns of data lists based on different data queries such as incident statuses, severity levels, and priority tiers, enhancing visual clarity and enabling quick identification and response to critical issues.
Customer example: One of the world’s largest film producers uses configurable colour-coding in their security control rooms to prioritise and focus on key incidents, when hundreds of incidents are recorded at any time to ensure an efficient management of security, safety and operational disruptions across their facilities.
Automated responses and instructions
Based on predefined rules and scenarios, automated initiated responses to incidents can be made. This might confirmations, instructions, hints and tips or contacting relevant personnel automatically, ensuring a swift and coordinated response.
Customer example: For the City of London’s tallest and largest building, automated systems rapidly initiate evacuation procedures and instructions during major incidents. This ensures timely alerts, efficient coordination, and real-time updates to on-site teams and building occupants.
Progression through incident statuses
Automation can move incidents through the workflow or response cycle by automatically updating the status based on predefined criteria. This ensures that all stakeholders are aware of the current status and that incidents are progressed without unnecessary delays.
Customer example: One of the world’s largest FM businesses uses automated status progression across logs, events, requests, incidents and checks to systematically advance through predefined status stages until closure to ensure performance metrics are delivered.
Situational awareness
Automation can scan for other nearby threats, providing situational awareness to ensure that all potential risks are identified and managed. This helps in understanding the broader context of an incident and preventing secondary incidents.
Customer example: A British multinational jeweller enhances situational awareness by monitoring geo-mapped OSINT and Dark Web alerts, ensuring prompt detection of security threats global – leading to coordinated investigation and effective response.
Performance metrics
Automated performance metrics based on key performance indicators (KPIs) can be generated. This includes measuring response times, incident resolution times, and the effectiveness of different response strategies, providing valuable insights for continuous improvement.
Customer example: One of Europe’s busiest train stations uses automated performance metrics to monitor patrol and compliance activities, ensuring timely and efficient security operations, tracking key performance indicators, and maintaining high safety standards for passengers and staff.
Efficient incident analysis
Automation can quickly gather and analyse data related to an incident, this data is crucial for understanding the scope and nature of the risk. By automating this process, teams can focus on interpreting the results and planning the response rather than collecting and sifting through data manually.
Customer example: A British multinational retailer for clothing, footwear, and home products uses automated systems for efficient incident analysis, quickly gathering and analysing data to identify trends, enhance response strategies, and minimise disruptions, ensuring a safe and secure shopping environment.
Continuous improvement and learning
Automated incident response systems can learn from each incident, improving their detection and response capabilities over time. Algorithms can analyse past incidents to refine detection patterns and response strategies, making the system more effective with each threat it encounters.
Customer example: A large UK retailer continually improves and learns by risk profiling their store estate and analysing organised crime patterns. This proactive approach enhances security measures, optimises resource allocation, and mitigates risks effectively across all locations.
Integration with other business intelligence tools
Automation can integrate with various BI tools, leveraging the strengths of multiple tools to address threats more effectively.
Customer example: A UK government fire and rescue organisation integrates with business intelligence tools by extracting incident data to their data lake, using Power BI for advanced analytics and reporting, enhancing decision-making and operational efficiency across the service.
How to implement automation in your incident response strategy
Assess your current capabilities
Begin by evaluating your current incident response processes and identifying areas where automation can provide the most significant benefits. Consider the tools and systems you already have in place and how they can be integrated with automated solutions.
Choose the right tools
Select automation tools that align with your organisation’s needs and security objectives. Look for solutions that offer scalability, ease of integration, and robust support for incident detection, analysis, and response.
Train your team
Ensure that your security team is trained to work with automated systems. Provide training on how to interpret automated alerts and reports, and how to interact with automated containment and mitigation tools.
Monitor and refine
Regularly monitor the performance of your automated incident response systems and make adjustments as needed. Use metrics such as response time, containment time, and incident resolution time to evaluate effectiveness and identify areas for improvement.
Conclusion
Automation is a powerful tool for accelerating incident response, enabling organisations to detect, analyse, and respond to threats more quickly and efficiently. By integrating automation into your incident response strategy, you can enhance your security posture, reduce the impact of security incidents, and maintain the trust of your customers. Embrace automation to stay ahead in the ever-evolving landscape of threats.
The right combination of technology, people, and processes leads to optimal results. Platforms like Zinc Systems’ Synapse integrate various tools and processes into a single cohesive system, ensuring that automated responses are seamlessly aligned with human workflows. This integration facilitates a more efficient and effective incident response.
Learn more about how Zinc can support your organisation in the modern era its features and capabilities here.
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