A critical partner in your supply chain just went down. An earthquake just hit your main operations hub. Breaking news about your organization just hit social media. Bad news first—there’s always another crisis or existential threat to your organization on the horizon. If you don’t have an established Crisis Response process and team in place, you’re running a high risk of failure. If you do have a process and team, you should be continuously iterating based on the threats and the level of sophistication or you will also risk failure.

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.