Recent events have tested decision-making and prioritisation skills to their limits. Faced with new situations, users do their best to process the information and take what they think is the best action in that moment. If they could tackle each incoming challenge one at a time it would easily be manageable. However, things get more complicated when several things occur at once, or when a single incident creates multiple tasks to be carried out before it can be resolved.
In these circumstances human factors quickly come into play. Familiarity and experience in dealing with matters and the level of emotion, stress and fatigue all come to the fore, impacting the quality of the decisions being made. Faced with information overload it quickly becomes impossible to prioritise tasks appropriately and to tackle them in the right order. Consistency quickly goes out of the window and new, more urgent matters that arise risk being neglected until it’s too late.
An operator in a Security Operations Centre is responsible for safeguarding people, assets and spaces in both uneventful and high-stress situations. In traditional security applications the systems don’t paint the full picture of what is happening within their environment. Thousands of sensors may be flagging things for their attention. Some of these will be urgent, some will be fine to tackle later and many will be false alarms. It is left to the discretion of the individual which is most urgent. This can be dangerous as routine incidents, such as a faulty cameras or a broken card reader, can get lost in the noise and compromise the entire organisation’s security and operations.
That’s a lot for an experienced individual to manage in a co-ordinated, predictable and repeatable fashion, even considering they’re required to categorise and resolve the issues while simultaneously adhering to compliance regulations and maintaining accurate reports.
There’s often a manual detailing the standard operating procedures, but it’s a static document that can’t cover all eventualities.
All of the above is difficult in normal circumstances. So, what happens when trying to continue functioning with a significant portion of the workforce unavailable, less experienced members trying to pick things up and the organisation responding to events they are encountering for the first time?
Genetec Mission Control is a collaborative decision management system that simplifies incident response through greater situational intelligence and guided action. It does this by taking operation procedures and making them dynamic, digitising them and presenting them as sophisticated decision trees that can guide the operator through all eventualities. The system prioritises larger incidents or threats and removes emotion from the equation by steering the operator through every step until an incident is resolved.
Every step is automatically documented, making it easier after the issue to show what was done, by who and when.
Every sector and organisation has its own challenges, but all can benefit from having a greater level of intelligence and consistency applied to the management of routine incidents and unexpected threats.