COVID-19 and the Crisis Management Software Market

After 9/11 and the financial crisis of 2008, companies understood the importance of having a business continuity and disaster recovery plan to deal with unprecedented situations. However, when COVID-19 struck, companies still found themselves underprepared to deal with this new type of critical event. To work through this, companies are making use of crisis management software that are specifically designed to manage businesses during a pandemic. While such software has been in the market for a while, it has only now gained traction and is helping ease the work of crisis management teams.

Growth for the Crisis Management Software Segment

Existing business continuity and crisis management software were built to deal with situations such as terrorism, natural disasters or cyber attacks. These software solutions were not equipped to deal with the circumstances arising due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Unforeseen situations included the majority of employees working from home and companies being forced to shut down global operations while following strict lockdown guidelines. As companies have not dealt with such a crisis before, they wish to have a platform that can help them in ensure business continuity. In 2020, the line between crisis management and business continuity is blurring and many customers are looking for solutions that can provide them with both functions. Hence, many crisis management and business continuity management software companies are taking a unified approach by providing a platform that can perform both functions. For example, Everbridge’s critical event management and Continuity Logic’s business continuity software perform functions like business continuity, disaster recovery, incident and crisis management under one platform. These factors have led to a huge surge in demand for crisis management platforms, which are expected to reach a market size of $10 billion by 2024. This growth will undoutedly increase when increased adoption in the wake of COVID-19 is analyzed.

New Solutions for a Post-COVID World

The pandemic not only disrupted global supply chains, but also poses a great threat to global health. To deal with these changes, many crisis management software providers came up with COVID-19 specific solutions. For example, MetricStream — a provider of governance, risk and compliance solutions — came up with a COVID-19 center that displays real-time trends and showcases updates from local and global health organizations, to ensure compliance with latest guidelines. Similarly, another provider — Noggin — came up with solutions to monitor staff health and contact trace workers to ensure that there are no employees who were recently in contact with a COVID-19 positive person.

Conclusion

The use of crisis management software will continue to rise as companies adjust to the new normal. However, looking at the unpredictability of the situation, crisis management software companies should periodically update their platforms and solutions so they can also be efficiently used by companies for other situations that may arise. Companies who previously depended upon manual crisis management are now looking at automating their procedures as some of the tasks such as emergency communications, alerts, notifications and plan management can be done quicker using automated solutions. Also, upcoming years might see a rise in consolidated solutions providing business continuity, disaster recovery, incident and crisis management in one platform as companies look for an end-to-end solution that can cater to all their needs. Some of the providers are also looking at utilizing AI in their platform to keep track of the company’s social media presence, which might help in communicating the situation better to keep the crisis under control.

References

• https://www.everbridge.com/wp-content/uploads/EMA-Critical-Event-Management.pdf
• https://www.noggin.io/blog/topic/crisis-newsletter
• https://www.metricstream.com/Covid-19-resource-center.htm