Before Everbridge, it would take us anywhere between 45 minutes to an hour and a half to mobilize our IT resource teams.  This was a manual call tree process where you are picking up the phone and calling everybody one by one. Now, by leveraging Everbridge, with a few clicks of a mouse, we are able to go in and request as many teams as we require to respond to an incident and bring them together to collaborate much faster. That 45 minutes to 90 minutes is now a few minutes up to maybe 15 minutes, depending on responsiveness or if the escalations have to kick in. We have seen substantial savings in manpower and a significant reduction in our time to respond and recover.

What we were looking at was: "How do you shorten the time to restoration when a crisis is occurring?" That's really the key benefit of the out-of-the-box Everbridge IT Alerting functionality for us.

In terms of improvements to our organization, we're still on that journey. I've used the terminology with our friends at Everbridge a few times, where I associate this with the traditional "crawl, walk, and run" metaphor. One year ago when we launched, we were barely crawling. Then we started crawling fairly quickly. I would say we're now in the "toddling" stage where we walk, but we don't walk all that well yet. For us, it is a continual improvement journey. 

We are anticipating that over the next 12 to 36 months we're going to go from toddling to walking very upright and then into running.

Organizationally, we have gained some benefits already. Even in the first few months, we recognized or realized some of those benefits that I described above around shortening the time to resolution. 

What we envision getting as an additional organizational benefit is system consolidation. For example, we've got four different systems today that contain some of the data and capabilities that Everbridge can very naturally accommodate. We just haven't moved there yet. Over time, we'll see some reduced cost in infrastructure, reduced cost in application maintenance and complexity, some improved consistency across these procedures as a result of using one system versus many. This should contribute to further reducing the time to restore service. In the end, we get benefits adding up over time, where time to restore gets better and better, and our ability to leverage the platform in multiple ways gets better and better.

It's much easier to determine the impact, especially as we're developing a crisis management program. One of the things that the program was lacking and the reason why I was hired is that they need to develop it. They didn't have thresholds or criteria set. So, they were trying to respond to everything all of the time with no standards, structure, thresholds, or criteria set. Everbridge is one of those tools that you can use to identify potential impact.

For the P1s especially, we had a lot of incidents where we got notifications that things were going down, and just the time it took to get people on the call - the bridge - and to get people to respond sometimes took as much as half-an-hour or 45 minutes. Now it's really down to 15 to 20 minutes. So the response time in getting teams together is much better, much more effective.

At this stage, which is step one - and we're going to try to get better - we have incidents once a week. On each of those incidents we have to do calls on root analysis and why it happened. From that standpoint, we get people on a call much faster to get it resolved much faster. In turn, the calls are becoming less and less. We're down to once a week. We want to get down to once a month.

A better response time helps you learn what's going on and how to prepare for the next time. For example, knowing that in January we had an incident where Asia/Far East went down because the things we were doing at night caused that slowness and lag time, we realized that we if changed things that we do at night in America, we wouldn't have the lag time going on in Asia. We realized that the things we were doing in America were affecting the next day in Asia.

It helps us get everybody involved, the first, the second, and treasury, where normally, to get even one person on the line was difficult. I work at night, from 7:00 PM to 7:00 AM, and that's the hardest time to get somebody on the line and get them actively involved. But they know that when they get that call from Everbridge - and if they don't answer it goes to their home phone, it goes to their cell phone - it is important that they get on. It's not just a call for general information. They know if it's an Everbridge call that it's something very important and that their manager is looking at it. That puts us in a better place. When there is a call, they respond.

Everbridge IT Alerting accelerated the time to engage with our IT support staff. Our incident management team benefited by pulling the right personnel at any given time to troubleshoot serious IT issues. 

The interactive dashboard shows the state live, of who has joined and who is being contacted. The reporting that can be generated afterward also supports how teams responded to the system.

Everbridge IT Alerting also has a robust API which we have used for other monitoring systems to send to. The commands can be easily tested in Swagger.

We are in the process of automating a lot of our processes. Because it has a SaaS version, the APIs are easily integratable, and we are able to consolidate functions and vendors. This saves money, because of the downturn in the industry, as everybody is penny-pinching these days. We are able to find ways to cut back. This product is very helpful with that since it is a good tool for consolidating functions for security purposes and all of the security functions that the GSOC needs.

Our performance showed us that, for major incidents, we spent over 40 minutes just making manual call-outs. That is why we implement the tool in the first place and that time has been cut down to two or three minutes. We've had tremendous gains on that.

It's a lot easier to create and manage schedules, especially in comparison to the on-call scheduling creation in ServiceNow. That has always been something of a bear to operate. We've found it's a lot simpler in Everbridge.

It enables everybody on our team to focus on their primary responsibilities, driving toward restoration, instead of being distracted by manually calling folks.

We've created fake units in the CAD system and, when activated, it sends an email to Everbridge. That has allowed the dispatchers to send out quick notifications. Before, they'd have to log into Everbridge, find the right thing, fill it out - do the full Everbridge thing - which always got deferred to later because they were busy doing other things. By creating the fake unit in CAD to trigger the email integration, all they have to do is assign a unit using the system they're already working in and it will send out the raw information from the call. That's been helpful so that the command staff gets quicker notifications of things.

The initial reason we got it was the lightning protection integration. We had a guy struck by lightning at the airport about a year and a half ago. Our lightning system was going off but this provides an extra layer of protection. With it, all the people who have signed up for that notification automatically get an Everbridge notification on their phone as soon as the thing goes off. They know, "This is active, I should do something about that," instead of relying on the horns and sirens that the lightning system uses. It's hard to quantify. We haven't had anyone struck by lightning since, but we hadn't had anyone struck by lightning before either. It is just an extra way for our tenants to be able to be in the loop on what's happening.

The lightning integration has been really helpful, especially for our maintenance department. It was intended for tenants and stakeholders. But the maintenance department, because they're out in the field all day, their director said all their work phones get it, no matter what. Before, they were running around trying to find people to tell them, "Lightning is on," to make sure they were shutting down. Now, everybody out there in the field who has a phone, and almost all of them do, immediately knows the lightning system is active and that they need to shut down.

What it allows us to do is integrate with our CMDB. Within our CMDB, we have everything including the ownership, from the executive level down to operational. It enables us to quickly and easily identify who the target audience is through the subscription model that is embedded in Everbridge. It helps with targeted communication and accuracy and timeliness. On average, it saves us roughly five to seven minutes, when we compare all of the manual processes we used to have versus using the tool as integrated into our ticketing system. We send about 15 to 20 of these broadcast messages per day, on average. So the time savings are definitely substantial.

This product has allowed the teams to focus on troubleshooting rather than dealing with the administrative task of having to notify individuals or groups about incidents. This has saved man-hours and has already paid for the product.

We have been able to use it to track and verify that people are on the bridge. It has also made it much easier when you have one touch to join the bridge, and we have been tracking our resolution time, which is now shorter. This is partly because of Everbridge and it being easier to get people on the phone. Also, we are able to escalate and track resources throughout the incident process.

They have improved our ability to be flexible in the way that we are setting up our calendar and structure. We can use it for individual call-outs versus an incident versus being able to run a test, etc. 

For us, having a quick response to urgent events - events that were not necessarily critical but that could become critical if not dealt with urgently - was important for us.

Prior to having a notification system in place, we either had to have an operations person checking all the queues in Remedy or someone subscribing to emails from Remedy and then doing manual call-outs to people at 3 am because a server died.

We had a fairly sophisticated ticket flow. We had a monitoring system with an events co-relation and event management system that would then automatically create incident tickets. The incidents tickets, based on their level of urgency, would then be channeled out through the Everbridge IT alerting platform which would then trigger off escalations based on the urgency of the incident. For example, if there was a P1 incident where the data center was down, it would escalate much more quickly than if there was a P3 issue that you needed to look at quickly to avoid a P1.

If we were to compare no IT alerting to IT alerting of any kind, the latter makes a significant difference. In our case, we used to have real, live operators who would call people out. Now, the operations staff is there just to manage some escalations but it really removes the human from the equation, from the moment of detection to notification. 

Before, we'd have a human looking at a console of some kind and that person would then have to look up a contact list to find out who was the owner of the alert, find their number, call them and, if nothing happened, figure it out, and say, "Okay, I've got to escalate." They would then have to call the second person in line, and so on. It was not really a manageable situation. Having an alerting solution connected to our ticketing system made the flow much more effective and really did improve our overall response time and uptime.

The rotation and replacement options save our managers a lot of time.

We went from a manual email system to an organized responsive automated system. It was able to improve our efficiency and improve everyone's responsiveness, because people were not responding to emails. 

It also improved our ability to capture everything in tickets, whereas before, emails and tickets were rarely, if ever, getting created.

We have been somewhat able to quantify the benefits. Users like the ease of use via the mobile app. Also, the simplicity of the on-call process is encouraging stakeholders to use the product rather than to try to call someone directly.

It has made the technical engagement process more efficient, going from approximately five minutes to generate a page down to 30 seconds.

It's now a little quicker to get folks together on a bridge. It has enabled us to have quicker times to resolution.

We have been able to quantify improvements in escalation and time to resolution. It has decreased timeframes and improved resolution by 35 - 40 percent.

We used to have one individual handling a call, along with other duties. So at times, they would have to step away from those other duties to handle the call or reach out to someone else. This solution has allowed them to be on the call for questions, while still being able to escalate outward.