Interview: Steve Foster, Everbridge

How has Australia coped with COVID-induced changes to operations and workplaces? Will things go back to a ‘new normal’ in 2022?

When the pandemic first hit we all scrambled to adapt as teams were forced to work from home. Every store that sold tech was suddenly sold out of monitors, laptops, webcams, microphones and all the building blocks we needed to be predictive from home.

But as the pandemic continued, organisations adapted. Everyone started refining what was needed to make remote working not just possible but also convenient and productive.

The new normal of 2022 and beyond is the realisation that hybrid workplaces need not be feared. We’ve proven people are more productive and they offer significant organisational benefits in terms of employee wellness and reduced need for renting huge office spaces, saving the bottom line. There’s a new dynamic developing where people are being trusted to work remotely and that it’s possible to have great communication without needing to drive to an office or fly across a country of the world.

Which new technologies will reach critical mass and become dominant in 2022?

Technology is developing rapidly. The building blocks are there for organisations to do almost anything they can imagine. But ensuring everything is running well and securely will become increasingly important.

At Everbridge, we provide a cloud-based Critical Event Management (CEM) platform that enables customers to see and anticipate various forms of disruption. We help businesses identify the assets that are most valuable to them and where the risks are. We define a critical event as something at the intersection of those two things.

We bring digital transformation to safety, security, and operational resiliency. Our aim is to mitigate and potentially eliminate the impact of a critical event on an organisation.

That means tracking globally, natural disasters, IT disruptions, civil unrest and other events that can impact operational safety and effectiveness so organisations can pre-emptively act to minimise impact.

How can I.T. have a greater impact on organisational efficiency in 2022, and who (CEOs, CIOs) should lead the charge?

The traditional approach to critical event management was very reactive. Something broke so we’d send experts in to fix it by following a procedure or playbook. But that doesn’t scale in today’s world. There are cybersecurity attacks every second. In Australia, critical infrastructure is attacked every 32 minutes. The reactive break/fix world does not exist anymore.

Customer expectations have changed with self-service citizen services. Technology needs to adapt but remain seamless to the user. That means you need a robust and scalable incident management solution that is futureproof and adapts with you.

The solutions obviously have a technology edge but initiatives must be business led and I.T. delivered. The CEO needs to lead this shift, run the initiative through the Chief Risk Officer and have it delivered by I.T. This is the Fusion Centre approach to CEM.

What’s on your tech wish list from governments, innovators and the wider industry in 2022?

A CEM platform that works with the Fusion Centre should be at the top of every organisation’s wish list. This is a risk-based, technology-delivered approach to identifying critical assets, the risks that can impact them and having automated processes that support people to ensure that the impact of a critical event is mitigated.

This requires a centralised tool that unifies all the requirements for an organisational-wide efficient response. Incident response in government agencies or private companies is often hampered by internal silos. Improved collaboration improves response times and fosters a shared vision of keeping people and places safer.

Steve Foster is VP ANZ at Everbridge. With a background in strategic business development and sales, Steve has over 15 years’ experience with multinationals in global and regional leadership roles, specifically in Cloud (Application Development/DevOps/SRE/Automation) for SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS Solutions.