Effect of 9/11 on Risk Management in Organizations
One of the most important lessons learned by organizations after the World Trade Center attacks were the need to ensure that the workforce should be resilient through technological means. The concept of “workforce resilience” consists of the need to give people access to the Internet, electricity, VPNs, and services that provide mass notifications. Lack of communication after an emergency may lead to negative outcomes for both the company and its employees.
This initiative and expenditure meet the objective of making the workforce more capable of continuing its work as soon as possible. Organizations also began storing emergency supplies for disaster situations. Risk management became more reliant on technological solutions and how they may be used during emergencies. Recovery of data and work processes is currently a priority for the majority of affected organizations (Rees, Breen, Cusack, & Hegney, 2015).
The Use of Social Media in Emergency Situations
Social media is a powerful tool for almost instantaneous communication over long distances and to large groups of people. Whenever an emergency situation occurs, people need to be informed of it as fast as possible and kept continuously in touch with the newest development. For organizations, this form of communication is important not only because it can be used to help people in need but also to provide accurate information about the state of the company. Rumors can be controlled through social media, and various offices of the company may be informed of how to behave in case the key office becomes disabled during a disaster (Alexander, 2014).
The Use of Distanced Geographic Location for Backup Storage
Recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives determine how much information may be stored at a distanced geographic location by an organization. By keeping critical information in a remote location on a different power grid than the one used by the company, an organization is able to recover from a disaster faster. This type of backup solution can have a large impact on the recovery process of an organization. While it does not provide a complete recovery after the backup is used, this procedure should be able to ensure that the company is capable of functioning even if the majority of data is lost. If a company is able to have a recent backup of all the information critical to its operation, it should be able to minimize losses and recovery time (Kokkinos, Kalogeras, Levin, & Varvarigos, 2016).
Cloud Services
Cloud services allow companies to have a non-centralized backup location that is available from any computer that has access to the company account. By using a service that is not tied to a single location, the company avoids situations where the backup center is unavailable due to internal issues. These services are available to firms of any size, and even smaller organizations should be able to use them because lower amounts of data are often sold for lower prices (Hua, Liu, & Feng, 2016). The solution is not perfect despite its effectiveness. Such services rely on Internet access being available and may be expensive for companies with a lot of critical data (Chang, 2015).
Conclusion
The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center changed a lot of aspects of American life. The almost instantaneous destruction of infrastructure made many organizations reconsider their approaches to risk management. With the power of social networking, distant location backups, and cloud services, companies attempt to prevent the same issues that were present in the aftermath of the attacks. Whether they may be effective or not is hard to tell because it is possible that a physical attack may coincide with a virtual one.
References
Alexander, D. E. (2014). Social media in disaster risk reduction and crisis management. Science and Engineering Ethics, 20(3), 717–733.
Chang, V. (2015). Towards a Big Data system disaster recovery in a Private Cloud. Ad Hoc Networks, 35, 65–82.
Hua, Y., Liu, X., & Feng, D. (2016). Cost-efficient remote backup services for enterprise clouds. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 12(5), 1650–1657.
Kokkinos, P., Kalogeras, D., Levin, A., & Varvarigos, E. (2016). Survey: Live migration and disaster recovery over long-distance networks. ACM Computing Surveys, 49(2), 1–36.
Rees, C. S., Breen, L. J., Cusack, L., & Hegney, D. (2015). Understanding individual resilience in the workplace: The international collaboration of workforce resilience model. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1–7.