Everbridge, a global leader in Critical Event Management (CEM), and a Winner in the Annual ‘ASTORS’ Homeland Security Awards Program for Three Consecutive Years, has achieved the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 27701 certification for its compliance with globally applicable privacy best practices.

The relatively new ISO/IEC certification, which launched in August 2019, comprises a meticulous certification process designed to help organizations protect personally identifiable information (PII) and other data.

According to media analysis ‘Why every business should consider ISO 27701 compliance for their vendors‘ (published in CSO), the new ISO standard provides a comprehensive set of controls for information security and the protection of personal information.

“The article goes on to state: “This new standard is the ‘icing on the cake’ for security compliance.”

“The well-known ISO 27001 forms the foundation and the new ISO 27701 builds on that foundation to provide a comprehensive set of controls for information security and the protection of personal information.”

ISO 27701 compliance, the privacy extension to ISO 27001, serves as just the latest example in a growing list of certifications and awards earned by Everbridge.

In June 2020, Everbridge successfully renewed its Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Agency Authorization, representing the federal government’s most rigorous security and risk management review process for cloud products and services.

Everbridge also currently holds SSAE 18/ISAE-3402 Service Organization Controls (SOC) 2 and 3 Reports, German Government Cloud Computing Compliance Controls Catalog (C5) Report and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 27001 Information Security Management System certifications.

“Everbridge remains committed to protecting our customers’ data and continuing to lead the global critical event management industry by example,” explained Tracy Reinhold, Everbridge Chief Security Officer.

“Certification for ISO 27701 showcases Everbridge’s market-leading compliance portfolio and our determination to set the highest of standards, especially as our technology helps organizations return to offices and other public spaces during the ongoing global pandemic.”

Everbridge recently introduced its COVID-19 Shield™a fully turnkey COVID-19 shield software that mitigates disruption from Coronavirus with purpose-built pandemic data feeds, quick-start templates, and integrated modules.

Drawing upon 18 years of crisis management experience, Everbridge’s purpose-built packages mitigate the impact of coronavirus by leveraging the company’s industry-leading CEM platform, used by over 5,000 enterprises globally, to help organizations identify their risks, safeguard their workforce, and manage disruptions to their operations and supply chain.

(Learn More about Everbridge’s Fully Turnkey Solution Mitigates Disruption from Coronavirus with Pandemic Data Feeds, Quick-Start Templates, and Integrated Modules. Courtesy of Everbridge and YouTube. Posted on Apr 6, 2020.)

Due to the swift spread of the outbreak, Everbridge offers a Rapid Deployment package for governments, businesses, and healthcare entities to implement the COVID-19 Shield solutions in under 48 hours.

COVID-19 Shield offers three new out-of-the-box solutions to help organizations.

• The individual offerings include Know Your Risks through COVID-19 alerts correlated to an organization’s locations.

• This solution offers pandemic Situation Reports developed from the world’s largest vetted database of risk data, drawn from machine learning analysis of over 22,000 data sources from 175+ countries and validated by a 24/7 team of analysts monitoring local verified sources.

• The real-time intelligence includes case statistics, travel advisories, closures and supply chain impacts, all automatically correlated to a business’ affected people and assets.

Secondly, COVID-19 Shield offers Protect Your People to manage critical response plans and automate communications with impacted people, responders, leadership and other stakeholders.

• Protect Your People correlates a specialized Everbridge-developed threat feed on incidences of the coronavirus with the previously visited, last known and expected location of people in order to help businesses understand the risks to their organization and take appropriate actions.

• It includes out-of-the box coronavirus-tailored messaging templates for health advisories, travel bans, work-at-home directives, and regular wellness checks.

• Organizations can also establish high-risk Incident Zones and send instructions when anyone enters these areas.

Thirdly, COVID-19 Shield helps Protect Your Operations and Supply Chains by automatically correlating alerts to physical assets including offices and facilities, production plants, suppliers and supply chain routes, in addition to people.

• Protect Your Operations pinpoints potential impacts to your assets and production resources, as well as to your suppliers and distribution routes, automates initiating standard operating procedures to quickly resolve issues, and generates real-time status reports on key remediation and recovery tasks.

• Additionally, the offering reduces liability through full audit trails and after-action reporting.

• By gaining an organization more time and a more complete picture from which to act, Protect Your Operations enables management teams to be more proactive in mitigating the consequences of the coronavirus.

The COVID-19 Shield packages also provide access to the Everbridge Data Sharing Private Network, which enables customers to share information publicly or privately.

A business, for example, can share information with local government agencies and healthcare facilities to gain more local situation intelligence and to better coordinate response activities.

“Staying ahead of the coronavirus continues to be a major challenge for governments, businesses and healthcare systems across the globe,” said Claudia Dent, SVP of Product Marketing at Everbridge.

“Everbridge works with thousands of organizations to help them protect their people and their operations. In one week alone, our customers sent more than 30 million coronavirus communications using our platform, a testament to the need for accurate and real-time information in a quickly evolving situation.”

“Organizations around the world have found a continuous need for relevant information and insights that are actionable and can be quickly deployed to protect their people, operations and supply chains from the impacts of coronavirus,” added Rebecca Scorzato, Partner at leading specialist risk consultancy, Control Risks.

“As the CEM leader for almost 20 years, Everbridge is uniquely positioned to meet this need and to provide highly relevant information to help understand and mitigate the impacts of this global outbreak.”

Everbridge’s COVID-19 Return to Work Software Solution is helping businesses and governments to manage the complexity of a staggered Global Recovery from COVID-19, improve safety for employees and citizens as they prepare to bring back the workforce and reopen society.

The company’s Return to Work solution enables businesses to manage the complexity of diverse city, state, and country guidelines and mandates that will evolve dynamically over time, as well as ensures compliance with a full audit trail.

Everbridge helps businesses manage all of this complexity through real-time risk intelligence, based on 22,000 data sources across 175 countries, that tracks everything from virus hotspots and travel restrictions, to quarantines and states of emergency, to production stoppages and resumptions, to protests and civil unrest.

The new Everbridge Return to Work solution speeds up contact tracing efforts by providing an automated approach to tracking an individual’s exposure to the virus at work, drawing upon 225 pre-existing, out-of-the-box integrations with such systems as calendaring applications, corporate travel itineraries, building access control, and visitor management.

Everbridge enables over 100 communication modalities, including its mobile app, to communicate with and provide real-time feedback from employees, such as wellness checks, which can be used to determine who are candidates to return to work.

Overall, Everbridge digitizes and automates the end-to-end return-to-work process while dramatically improving the response time to prevent unnecessary exposure to the virus when days and even hours matter.

Health organizations such as the CDC and the World Health Organization (WHO) recommend that return to work best practices should require employers to monitor employee health through testing, wellness checks and self-reporting (where employees identify how they are feeling through an app, such as the Everbridge mobile app, on an ‘opt-in’ basis).

Contact tracing seeks to identify who else has been exposed to the virus and to coordinate isolation and communications.

“The world’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic will be complex, staggered and unpredictable,” said Ajay Nigam, Chief Product Officer at Everbridge.

“In the meantime, technology, tools and data are available now to protect people as they return to work, get operations going, and to help governments keep their citizens safe in a better and more efficient manner while protecting privacy.”

“The better handle an organization has on all this complexity, the sooner businesses can return employees to work while governments safely reopen public spaces.”

“As we return to work, it is clear that business is at the forefront of managing the pandemic,” added Nick Allan, CEO at leading specialist risk consultancy, Control Risks.

“To keep people safe and a company operating successfully, any international organization will require detailed situational awareness to adhere to diverse and shifting guidelines across potentially hundreds of regions.”

Everbridge’s Return to Work software solution empowers organizations to:

• Automatically leverage the right intelligence, including changing government regulations such as quarantines, curfews, travel bans, new public health policies, and rapidly identify new disease outbreaks.

• Implement, manage and track the tasks for the right protocol at the right location and at the right time, e.g., testing, automated polling of employees or citizens, and enabling mobile wellness checks.

• Accelerate contact tracing by automating the discovery of symptomatic or infected workers – identifying the meetings, buildings, visitors they came in contact with – and mapping against prior travel.

  • Prevent future infections by proactively warning individuals before they enter an incident zone, e.g. an infection hot spot such as an area near a hospital or nursing home, or countries experiencing an increase in outbreaks.

  • Leverage special needs registries to note vulnerable individuals most in need of isolation protocols.

• Integrate polling data from employees or citizens – including results from wellness checks and safety check-ins – into decisions on who can return to work or public spaces.

• Automatically identify and manage impacts to specific assets, supply chain, and transportation routes by tracking production stoppages, closures, and civil unrest, all with a complete audit trail.

• Everbridge also enables governments to anonymously report on crowd movement and population density, without compromising privacy, in order to determine whether groups have achieved more critical mass than is permitted under distancing guidelines, and to verify the success of evacuation efforts.

For city, state, and national governments, Everbridge provides:

• population alerting

• incident zone management

• citizen polling at country-wide scale

In so doing, ensuring policies and restrictions are communicated as situations change; aggregates the most comprehensive risk intelligence from the Everbridge Network of public safety, healthcare, transportation and homeland security agencies; quickly ensures evacuations and dispersals have been followed; anonymously monitors crowd movements and previous possible virus exposure of citizens without requiring an app download or infringing privacy.

Combined with Everbridge’s new Contact Tracing software are facilitating the safe return to work for business, government and healthcare organizations.

Contact Tracing

(Dr. Paul Cieslak, Medical Director, Acute and Communicable Disease section, Oregon Health Authority explains what is contact tracing. Courtesy of Oregon Public Health Division and YouTube. Posted on Apr 17, 2020.)

The Everbridge Contact Tracing solution represents the digital transformation of contact tracing when compared to existing approaches which tend to fall into two more-limited categories: highly manual human calling supported by case management tools, or one of a variety of standalone opt-in-based mobile apps.

Contact Tracing represents a fundamental paradigm shift for corporate, government and healthcare organizations to more safely return people to work with a faster, more accurate, less costly approach, that also safeguards individual privacy.

Everbridge’s intelligent software-based automation can supplement or complement existing manual contact tracing efforts to improve accuracy and speed while reducing cost.

Unlike other contact tracing solutions, Everbridge’s multi-faceted approach triangulates multiple sources of data to provide more comprehensive information in a timely manner.

As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published recently: “Identifying contacts and ensuring they do not interact with others is critical to protect communities from further spread.”

“If communities are unable to effectively isolate patients and ensure contacts can separate themselves from others, rapid community spread of COVID-19 is likely to increase to the point that strict mitigation strategies will again be needed to contain the virus…”

“Technology partners are key in the modification of existing systems and the development of new user-friendly data interfaces to manage multiple data streams with seamless interoperability.”

Leveraging its market-leading CEM capabilities, Everbridge provides organizations with the industry’s only end-to-end contact tracing solution that combines an existing mobile app for wellness checks and self-reporting combined with pre-existing integrations of company systems to compile a more complete set of actionable information.

The mobile app enables individuals to track their symptoms and status with regular wellness checks.

When necessary, the system can quickly identify other workers who have been exposed to the virus and communicate the appropriate isolation protocols in an automated manner.

As a result, organizations will be able to: leverage a less expensive solution for shortening the cycle time of contact tracing and reducing the possibility of exposure; increase confidence among employees as they reintegrate into work; decrease compliance liability while providing a full audit trail; and maintain individual privacy.

“As the global leader in critical event management to help mitigate COVID-19, Everbridge offers the industry’s most comprehensive path for organizations to help people return to work and other public spaces,” says Imad Mouline, Chief Technology Officer at Everbridge.

“With the benefit of thousands of trusted sources of data and our advanced IoT capabilities, we are in a unique position to help organizations automate the coronavirus exposure tracking process, bringing people back safely and helping to recover their operations.”

Drawing on over 225 out-of-the-box integrations, the Everbridge contact tracing solution uses data from physical badge access control systems, Wi-Fi hot spots, calendaring systems, travel itineraries, visitor management, and thermal cameras to determine who may have been exposed to an individual with COVID-19.

Bluetooth Low Energy proximity data compiled from digital wayfaring capabilities add information on who was within close proximity; special needs registries help protect the most vulnerable people by highlighting if they have been near an infection; real-time risk intelligence based on 22,000 data sources across 175 countries, tracks everything from virus hotspots (including a dedicated coronavirus data feed) and travel restrictions, to quarantines and states of emergency in order to determine if people are near areas of heightened risk.

Crisis management capabilities automate workflows to alert people potentially at risk, and the system as a whole leverages the world’s largest and most scalable mass notification and public warning platform with the ability to reach over 550 million people in more than 200 countries and territories.

Additional Use Cases for Businesses, Government and Healthcare Organizations:

• Track risk of infection based on location, proximity to hot zones and/or recent potential exposure through travel

• Conduct indoor location-based tracing, room occupancy and employee density monitoring, physical distancing detection, and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) compliance assessment

• Collect accurate data by combining always-on proximity reporting with opt-in polling from employees via their mobile devices

• Use Everbridge mobile app to help guide patients’ indoor movement, including the Direct to Navigate feature for COVID-19 positive patients, and the Wayfinder feature for all other patients, thereby reducing the risk of contagion

• Help support resumption of surgeries that had been put on hold due to the pandemic

Everbridge further showcased these technologies at last month’s “Coronavirus: the Road to Recovery” virtual leadership summit, which brought together the best minds across public and private sectors, including C-level speakers from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Cleveland Clinic, U.S. Army, Accenture, Biogen and more.

(Learn More. Hear Top Executives Talk Return to Work Amid COVID-19. Courtesy of Everbridge and YouTube. Posted on Jun 4, 2020.)

On-demand online content from the event may be found here.

Additional recent recognition for Everbridge includes Frost & Sullivan’s Critical Event Management (CEM) Technology Leadership Award, expansion of its existing portfolio of over 160 patents.