By Marc Burdiss CEM, MEP, M.Ed, Northern Arizona University

When was the last time you exercised your mass notification system? Six months ago? A year? If you are like most, you can point to the day and time, and maybe even produce a brief After Action Report (AAR) from the event and confidently check that box completed. That’s great, but probably not enough, and you are probably not using all the exercise approaches you should be trying. Let me explain...

This is really more than automating just emergency notifications. It is about thinking holistically about what happens when there is an incident and what communications actions occur during that first and most important minute. Notifications are certainly one type of communications action, however so are mobilizing resources and collaborating with your emergency response team. It is about automating a sequence of actions.

It’s a fact of life in 2017 that cyber threats are everywhere. We know that we need to set strong passwords on our email, encrypt connections to our banking, healthcare, wifi, and even lockdown our social media accounts.  

So, why should your emergency notification system (ENS) be any different?

A breach of your email or social media could be embarrassing.

A breach of your bank account could be inconvenient and very costly.

A breach of your emergency notification system could be even worse. It could reduce confidence in real alerts or even put your community in real-world danger by causing a panic.

What can you do to help ensure that a hacker doesn’t compromise your ENS?

As humans, it is common for us to get set in our ways. Change is never perceived as easy, and as Stan Goldberg said in Psychology Today, “being is easier than becoming”. But in the overlap of technology advancements with organizational safety initiatives, the obligation to move forward to provide better ways to save lives and keep our people informed during an emergency is alive and well. Although we can be resistant at times, we must make continuous changes to stay with the times and improve.

Many of us can think back to our first semester at college. On move-in day, we met the Residential Assistant in our dorm, walked the path to each class we were to attend, and made sure we could locate the mess hall. We did all of those things to reduce the stress and anxiety we knew we would already be facing on our first day of classes after moving away from home and knowing practically no one. We prepared for all the things we would anticipate going wrong.