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Zapoj CEM Helps Manage a Robust IT System in Higher Education

An unplanned IT failure or IT service interruption which is yet to pose a critical IT threat is an IT incident. The sudden IT incident event means key business operations are not continuing, affecting a large number of service areas and people. In this instance,  near real-time, IT incident management built on Zapoj CEM provides innovative solutions with a plethora of tools- visual risk intelligence, reliable IT alerting to improve decision making and to proactively handle critical IT events in a high-growth and ever-expanding learning environments like colleges and universities.

The CEM technology that Zapoj leverages uses AI-powered solutions to analyze the complexity of IT events, improve visualization with data integration capabilities and enable actions through apps, desktop software for incident responders. The quick actions can deliver faster resolutions to better reinstate IT services and mitigate its impact on operations that college campuses build their interdependencies upon for teamwork and communications.

Here’s what IT outages mean to colleges and universities and how Zapoj as a leading CEM software can help them boost the efficiency of their IT Service Management tool to provide a fantastic experience for staff, faculty, and students.

What system outage costs your higher education?

IT services are the benchmark to ensure uninterrupted learning, research and development, and the undertaking of official communications and consulting services all through the day, year overWhat system outage costs your higher education?year. University administrators, faculty, and staff need a wide range of IT tools that allow them to connect and communicate with students, parents, visitors, stakeholders, and peers.  Crucial administrative operations from building a virtual network for distance learning to offering rapid and ceaseless online course registration- a robust IT service extends its support for user satisfaction, unique experience, and efficiency to help foster an advanced learning environment on a higher level.

The complexities as exacerbated by sudden application downtime, website crash, power outage, low performances of data centers, networks, and high-risk cyber-attacks can heighten the risks of service disruption.

IT downtimes basically are the consequences due to critical events like heavy rains, storms, lighting, and mostly because of unforeseen developments across IT services that appear suddenly as major threats for higher education.

IT downtime insights: 

As reported by Gartner, IT downtime costs businesses 5,600 USD per minute. A more recent report highlights that an estimated $260,000 gets wasted due to an average downtime per hour. The study reported the degradation by 60% in monetary losses since 2016 across businesses.

Higher education faces modern-day IT outages which impact its ability to deliver service across channels, large spanning departments, and leave little room for IT responders to prevent chaos and troubles.

The routine IT challenges in higher education across universities and college campuses can subside when education administrators or the IT service management team rely on visualization and comprehensive IT alerting responses.

Ensure rapid recovery by optimizing Zapoj CEM IT incident management

AI-powered IT incident handling tool builds situational awareness across the IT Service Management and helps with event identification, prioritization, and remediation as a form ofpredictive intelligence the initial restoration process. The IT support team in your college campus can establish a unified network that escalates real-time alerting and helps reduce the impact.

Route incidents with predictive intelligence

The incident routing is still inconvenient for several academic infrastructures as it relies upon manual workflow processes. The worst part is that it wastes valuable time for recovery and does notprovide much progress within scheduled work hours for IT service desk staff. And in parallel, manual handling of workflow is error-prone, and hence routing is more likely to reach the wrong destination, delaying the recovery process.

With predictive intelligence at the core of Zapoj IT incident management, the CEM tool can harness data from multiple existing ITSM solutions, Service desk, IT monitoring tools, and IT alerting tools. By analyzing risk data, Zapoj improves visibility into evolving IT threats and helps route incident handling workflows in an automated way.

Apply IT alerting or IT incident communications

An easy-to-use command center is competent in improving visibility into your workflows. You can use predefined message templates to communicate with IT service desk staff and Apply IT alerting or IT incident communicationsprioritize incident handling response by creating chatOps and war rooms.  Relying on efficient IT alerting or IT incident communication tools, you can discuss with your response team and derive actionable insights into the next step of the recovery process.

Communicate IT issues with on-call management 

Zapoj always makes sure your on-call team is ready to solve the IT issues as soon as the issue is escalated. As you build escalation rules, on-call schedule management is much easier. So, the IT incident team is always confident that the right response team does not miss a critical alert until acknowledged and addresses the issues.

The efficiency of delivering real-time IT incident response improves the mean time to repair (MTTR) and encourages faster resolutions of the IT incident.

Advanced reporting and analytics

Zapoj also carefully designs its analytics dashboard to help the IT response team to assess how they perform during IT incidents. In-depth analysis of team response by area and type help meet service-level expectations. From thisAdvanced reporting and analytics perspective, incidents that take too long to handle can be resolved using performance analytics.

Institutes are looking for more effective IT service tools to provide uninterrupted service to advance their learning and knowledge. Zapoj delivers high-caliber support to mission-critical objectives of higher education learning management and also improves ROI by automating IT alerting. In times of pandemic where virtual learning rests on the active and robust IT infrastructure, embedding Zapoj CEM into your ITSM systems enables higher education to deliver a connected experience for students, faculty, and staff. To support your growth and transform the academic experience, Zapoj CEM must feature in your IT infrastructure. Call us for a demo.

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Zapoj Builds The Best Academic Experience for Safe Return to Campus

A new version of campus or university safety is gaining attention as university stakeholders or leaders are faced with challenges for advancing learning in a new environment of the COVID-19 pandemic. The safe return to campus emphasizes the serious involvement of higher education institutions in ensuring safety and security to health risks for students, faculty, and staff. As they decide to reopen, Zapoj CEM enables a safe campus to allow everyone to connect, maintain, and continue future learning efficiently. By providing all necessary core capabilities to encourage the safe return of students, faculty, administration, management, stakeholders, peers, and staff to the key operations of learning management, Zapoj takes higher education to the next level with uncompromised campus experience.

Ensure campus readiness for everyone at higher educations

Ensure campus readiness for everyone at higher educations

The foremost requirement for a safe return to campus is to ensure effective measurements to help control infection from spreading and build a safe environment for campus reopen.

The Zapoj CEM facilitates stakeholders, administrators, security response teams to monitor the infection trends closely using its location intelligence across campus areas and in close proximity in the neighborhood. Gathering trending data to overlay into the system helps visualize case by case status of the infection based on deaths, infection spike, and also cumulative cases. This advanced level of risk visualizations offers a real-time data mapping capability to make data-driven decisions. Therefore, with a clear picture of the situation, higher education institutions can validate their steps to mitigating infection risk or carefully planning the return to schools.

Zapoj also empowers institutions to bolster their campus readiness preparedness strategy and execution. Using the opt-in services, university administration can invite students and each of the university members to submit their responses about regular health status. Zapoj has built-in contact centers where all member or students details are easily accessible and trackable. This is how universities can take advantage of contact tracing and identify infected students or members by using wellness checks or health status surveys.

Based on the real-time health screening feedback, colleges or universities can plan their strategies accordingly. If certain symptoms appear critical to campus reopen, universities can ramp up their efforts to strictly maintain social distancing norms, warn their people of using the infected locations around the college campus, and most importantly instruct the positive members or students to go for quarantine or people in close contacts with the infected person to take extra precaution to curb the transmission.

Prepare school or campus assets to reopen

The facility mapping gives complete awareness of how higher institutions can better manage
Prepare school or campus assets to reopensignificant criteria of disease control. Using location intelligence technology, Zapoj empowers facility managers to fully utilize its geospatial mapping solutions to quickly identify the risk-prone zones inside the premises of the campus or within a particular space such as library, office, administrative departments, and anywhere in the university.

This smart approach provides an additional advantage of maintaining social distancing compliance, while also preventing any chance of close proximity encounters. Location mapping observes the social distancing parameters to help with assessment. For instance, if any encounters occur between a healthy member and an infected person, location-based facility mapping instantly sends out notifications about interactions for immediate recovery processes. And in parallel, managers can optimize contact tracing to determine the infected person and identity places with higher risks of contact transmission.

Location tracking when combined with contact tracing capability can be more of use to improve density management. Location tracking is especially important to track density in some spaces like halls or events and, alert over violation of social distancing parameters.

Zapoj prioritizes sanitation drive as a step towards building a clean environment that promises a safe and risk-free campus for students. Real-time infection status through contact tracing is a flexible capacity of Zapoj to keep track of full audit trail history, and therefore, ensuring cleaning tasks when and as necessary over time.

From initiating isolation activities to launching cleaning initiatives, Zapoj CEM is purpose-built to prevent transmission risk and support continuity.

Enable return to campus conveniently with Zapoj

A safe return to campus also requires vaccination status on campus. Zapoj CEM is capable of managing a vaccination drive for students. Higher educationBuild The Best Academic Experience with Safe Return to Campusinstitutions may need this approach to amp up their campus readiness. Enrolling campus members, staff, faculty, and students in the vaccination is readily available with Zapoj contact tracing capabilities. As members sign up for opt-in services, they can communicate their current status after vaccination and receive reminders for the next dose of vaccine. By having everyone in the contact centers, administrators can keep track of vaccine status and ensure wellness checks. Multiple communication channels also help members continue the vaccination drive and meet all necessary requirements for a safe return to campus.

Zapoj CEM gives scalability with a number of solutions to effectively manage campus readiness. Contact tracing, location intelligence for proximity checks, vaccination status, cleanliness drive are ensuring campus safety and prepare universities to embrace and encourage the safe return to university or campus.

As you begin to reopen, get Zapoj CEM. Contribute not only towards continuity of learning but also ensure active participation in limiting the spread of deadly diseases like COVID-19. Need to know more. Call us or ask for a demo.

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Get smart visitor management solutions for higher education safety with Zapoj CEM

College or university campuses are none less than a micro-city, spreading over acres of land with an uncountable number of people moving around its multiple buildings or facilities and between departments. Staff, faculty, students, and additional people gather here- the number of visitors also fluctuates on any given day, which requires the university to keep track of its people for extra layers of security and safety.

An extreme challenge reveals the inability of the emergency response team of a higher education institution when there are a large group of students, parents, visitors, and sports fans gathering for different events and purposes. To manage an influx of people across college campuses and ensure their safety, an emergency communications system may lack robustness of Critical Event Management capabilities and visitor management applications altogether.

Visitor emergency communications when combined with Critical Event Management enables the higher education institutions to leverage the best-in-class emergency mitigations tools for its people to keep them informed, prepare them for safe evacuation, and ultimately keep them safe out of danger.

Here’s how SaaS-based CEM platform tool, Zapoj helps security operations managers at higher education with comprehensive visitor management solutions.

Why on-site scenarios at campus call for additional efficiencies and conveniences with emergency communications?

Why on-site scenarios at campus call for additional efficiencies and conveniences with emergency communications

A high volume of visitors can pose safety risks as operational challenges continue to linger with increasing need for quick evacuation processes. Keeping a tab of every visitor on-premise and monitoring their movement is a key approach to discovering what’s going on in and around, and therefore assessing the risk factors.

Campus events – sports day, music fest, public figure speech, including campus visit, parents weekend and more such events are huge crowd-pullers than usual days at the university premises. There could be many such instances that result in unforeseen risks from active shootout, gunman attack, campus fire, and facility damage.

Such scenario urges for an immediate requirement of emergency communications which helps locate and reach the visitors during an emergency. Most importantly, real-time emergency updates are crucial to making sure that every person whosoever is in danger could be reached out during emergency procedures and provided with information that guides them properly. Leveraging Zapoj CEM helps scale visitor management and notifications, while allowing for real-time threat visibility that improves emergency preparedness management.

Act quickly in different critical scenarios with Zapoj CEM solutionsAct quickly in different critical scenarios with Zapoj CEM solutions

Zapoj uses AI capabilities, which makes identifying threat scopes of unpredictable risks efficiently, enabling emergency security teams to use the built-in contact centers immediately and escalate emergency communications.

As the visitors or groups on university campuses are diverse, Zapoj contact center is flexible to adapt to event-based opt-ins that allow each type of group to sign up and receive real-time event information for increased visibility into the emergency situations . Not only is the contact center fast to get visitor information, but also the predefined messages are scalable to save time and shareable across social media platforms and other channels to enhance reach during emergencies. During any critical situations, higher educations can responsibly connect with the targeted recipients via Facebook, text, webpage, voice call, and on email also.

Marking restricted zones

The colleges or university can invite different types of visitor groups to its public events. And in parallel, those visitors can also be eager to know more about the safety preparedness. For events like music fests or guest lectures, visitors become careful about their safety.

Marking restricted zones

As part of robust visitor management procedures, emergency security teams can mark hazardous zones as restricted areas. With this precaution in place, in case of an emergency fire breakout, Zapoj CEM  can detect this threat and relay the data to the command center. Using geolocation, Zapoj can mark the exact location of the command center and help the emergency rescue team reach the targeted locations and launch the evacuation process.

Providing on-site visitor management experience

Providing on-site visitor management experience

Zapoj CEM using its location intelligence technology can help track the whereabouts of visitors in the premises. This capability also enables higher education to know how many visitors and college or university members are on the premises currently. This is helpful in guiding people for evacuation if any emergency occurs.

Accessibility is another security feature of Zapoj CEM to help enhance visitor management. With opt-in features, the identification of visitors can be established, thus eliminating the chances of unauthorized persons to access the premises.

Location technology also scales as an highly efficient wayfinding system to give an opportunity to navigate the large premises with ease. Multiple departments sprawling from one point to another is making it difficult for visitors to locate the right destination, wasting their time and adding to poor visitor experience. Zapoj CEM can help locate the target location as the visitors sign-up for opt-ins and reach the selected destination with no more extra effort.

Visitor engagement and management is an important criteria to ensure safety and security for every visitor higher education has on special days. The ability to provide real-time information through emergency communications is one of the basic requirements that college or university can provide to its people. Zapoj CEM helps in this perspective by enabling real-time emergency response and crisis management capabilities to provide improved visitor experience.

To learn more about Zapoj CEM, and its smart solutions for visitor management, give us a call or book a demo.

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Top 3 Things Higher Education Can Do To Build Resilience

Overview 

A real-time risk mapping allows higher school authorities to allocate appropriate resources to anticipate, locate, and respond to critical threats with the help of location intelligence and crisis communications- ensuring safety and security for everyone on and off campus.

Key Takeaways 

  • Emergency responders can use visual risk intelligence built on Zapoj CEM to detect the potential threat and its impacts.
  • Security teams can derive data-driven insights into threats and achieve accuracy with decision-making.
  • Higher education authorities can rely upon Zapoj CEM to evaluate safety measurements at campus and build a safe and secure learning environment.

An integrated suite of emergency communications and visual risk intelligence gives stakeholders, facility management and emergency security team of a higher education institution the freedom to prepare their contingency plan effectively. Taking into account the volatile nature of any critical events, getting insights into the trends can improve understanding of the potential risk and anticipate their impact on the facilities, people, assets, and operation continuity, encouraging remediation efforts rapidly.

To keep ahead of the critical events, higher education needs real-time data feed from a variety of sources – IoT sensors, drones, satellites, social media channels to achieve speed and relevancy so that they can establish accuracy in decision making and reduce mean time to repair.

Unpreparedness ramps up unprecedented risks

Several academic administrators still rely on disjointed emergency communications systems when they seek to adopt tools for critical event mitigation.

The diverse and evolving nature of critical events can be intimidating when they ensue. Extreme weather conditions – floods, cyclones, including other natural disasters like earthquakes, system outages or IT incidents, campus shootouts or gunman attacks, or disease outbreak could amplify the risk factors for higher education,requiring them to ensure safety and security for their students, staff, administrators, stakeholders, peers, and partners. The ability to mitigate risk, keep everyone safe, and restore functions at scale is the pillar stone to ensure resilience.

Campus safety

This powerful approach on the other hand could send out a message to students and their families about their capabilities to help build an efficient emergency preparedness strategy, and also inculcate an outlook to be a reliable and safe academic institution. To begin a comprehensive risk assessment and mitigation plan, higher education institutions can seek Zapoj, a fundamental CEM application to eliminate risk and build resilience into higher education ecosystems.

Let’s illustrate how administrators, stakeholders, and instructional staff can use Zapoj to become resilient by tapping into competitive advantage.

Keeping your people safe on and off campus

Keeping your people safe on and off campus

Campus safetyis more significant than ever since the pandemic has hit, requiring colleges and universities to engage with students, faculty, and people all across campus to keep them informed and safe.

Higher education needs a fast and effective crisis response that is highly effective and scalable during diverse campus events like violence, active shootout, fire, and critical weather events. With Zapoj CEM, AI-powered visual risk intelligence can streamline messages and provide only actionable insights to improve decision making and deliver highly targeted messages to the right people.

During a variety of critical events, designated emergency response teams can categorize event types and automate notifications specific to geolocations of the receiver when in harm’s way.

This way higher education can build robust recovery operations and encourage a collaborative environment focused on student’s safety.

By using Zapoj Critical Event Management, university stakeholders, and all partners can tap into the contact tracing capabilities and crisis communications, enabling effective management of disease control, implementing social-distancing norms, and preventing exposure. This helps the top leadership and emergency team at the universities abide by the regulatories to support the Safe return to campus. Also, colleges and universities failing to encourage reopening of learning institutions can reconsider their decision only if they seek help from a critical management tool.

Making learning more accessible

Apart from making campus safe for students, Zapoj CEM also helps ensure an uninterrupted learning experience. With the formal education shifting to a remote ecosystem, colleges today need to employ virtual learning to adjust to the current curriculum.Making learning more accessible

Providing robust IT systems not only keeps up with the education but also helps in unprecedented administrative work, ensures wi-fi connectivity in libraries, and keeps networks running for administrations to continue operations.  A few seconds of IT outage can impact the learning experience and also suspend core operations. By identifying the root cause of IT incidents, Zapoj automates digital workflows to the right IT responder and helps eliminate IT issues instantly.

Improving on-site coordination

In the event of an emergency situation during campus events, Zapoj encourages collaboration using location intelligence and enables crisis communication in real-time.

Knowing the whereabouts of the exact number of staff, students, and visitors on the campus, universities can improve outreach and enhance evacuation during fire, shootout or extreme weather events.

Visitor management

Visitor management is also a great way to ensure safety of people on campus or monitor movement of unauthorized people.  At the same time, location intelligence can be used to help visitors orient themselves and navigate the unidentified routes independently. Simultaneously, visitors can also know the restricted zones and avoid being safe.

Conclusion

Deriving values from Zapoj CEM gives the university, its stakeholders, and leadership an optimized experience to be resilient by defying the odds of critical events. By using the Critical Event Management platform, higher education can plan, monitor, mitigate and recover the impacts of critical events more effectively. They can therefore enhance their learning efficiency, improve learning outcomes, and deliver bespoke campus experience.

Many higher education can benefit from critical event management. To know more about Zapoj, give us a call.

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Prepare for campus safety with Zapoj CEM

Lately, colleges and universities have explored a new side to emergency threats- having a one-size-fits-all crisis communication tool cannot entirely focus on risk mitigation at campus premises. The volatile nature of the world is exposing students, faculty and its staff to unpredictable campus threats that largely involve terrorisms and active shooter.

AI-powered location aware technology with built-in risk intelligence that helps anticipate unpredictable campus events can support the recovery efforts to minimize risk and create a safe campus environment.

As colleges feel the need for a single glass of pane to
allow situational awareness
, a location-based Critical Event Management tool like Zapoj can level up their mitigation efforts to be compliant with the Clery Act- one of the significant law guidelines that ensures safety and security for college or university students. The Clery Act compliance is one side to ensuring student safety- building the best security practices can address a terrorism event or a an active shoot incident and ensure a resilient campus.

Those are complicated emergency situations and decision-makers need to utilize location intelligence as a basic approach to detect threats on assets and human experience.

Here’s how decision-makers at higher education institutions can enable a safe campus culture using Zapoj CEM.

The need for campus event safety

Large crowds are a common scene at college music concerts, sporting events, and lectures, and hence they have higher chances of inherent risks.

Missing an important threat opportunity means fostering an unsafe environment that could help with active shooting or allow rumors of a violence. As the basic survival instinct prompts to apply any measure to escape the scene, it basically sends shock waves across the campus premises that finally ends up in crowd rush, resulting in the most possible casualties from stampede. The high-speed storm can add an additional layer of concern while mass shooting rampage continues.  Security and emergency management needs to adopt an optimal level of campus safety readiness. The disaster preparedness process requires location intelligence to identify risks and the ability to communicate instantly with its people in harm’s way.

Given the rapid cases of active shooter events – especially deadliest mass shootings at college campuses or events, college students are worried about unsafe campus events. This evolving scenario requires the security and emergency management at higher education to revisit their emergency plans to simplify location intelligence and emergency response.

Better insights into threats with location intelligence

Better insights into threats with location intelligence

To proactively leverage the power of emergency communications and mass notifications , emergency preparedness plans must drive real-time threat feed to build visual risk intelligence.

Location intelligence predicts the source of threats and their impacts in real-time on human life and facilities. It’s true organizations are using a large tech stack to track data feeds that provide visibility into incident events of a particular area and help assess the risk impacts on facilities or life.  Tapping into data although is easy, making sense of it seems challenging. Data needs appropriate comprehension to help join dots between dispersed components and ensure information accuracy.

Build situational awareness

Build situational awareness

The capability to identify risk intelligence varies by how disjointed screens relay information and a single glass of pane communicates threat. 

Basically a traditional command center that higher educations use for the campus safety are not appropriately connected with proper locations. The data feeds it streams are presented on different disjointed screens, making it difficult for security analysts to monitor and develop accurate situational awareness.

The command center built on Zapoj gives a holistic view of its campus events- its surroundings, assets, and people all through a single pane of glass. It fetches all incident feeds and overlays them with so many other sources of data feed. Campus administration and security response teams can derive valuable metrics using AI-powered risk intelligence and assess the trends of threats.

With predictive analytics identifying the possible potential disruptions through a single glass of pane, security teams can gain situational awareness and improve their decision making. This helps higher education alert people who’s responsible to mitigate the risk and ensure safety to people in harm’s way.

Quick alerts and mass notifications for campus community Quick alerts and mass notifications for campus community

improving emergency response is critical to ensuring active remediation of critical threats on campus. During an emergency event, campus authority must look to provide contextual awareness through its notification message. Not every specific emergency notification would work for all people in danger. For different scenarios of an active shooter, one segment of people may need emergency notification to evacuate, the other section may hide out to avoid risk, while another segment of the community requires instruction to help with the recovery process.

Zapoj Critical Event Management gives the emergency response teams the flexibility to preconfigure messages to fit the demanding situations and rapidly reach masses with accurate information. The critical mass notifications also never miss people who’s in danger, which reach the destination via multi-modal paths – including emails, voice calls, social media, SMS or text messages and many more channels. Zapoj critical alerting or mass notifications also escalate via two-way messaging to ensure they are acknowledged and to notify if the recipient is safe or may require immediate support for rescue operations.

Be compliant with the Clery Act

Be compliant with the Clery Act

The risks associated with special or large campus events are concerning. Neglecting the Clery Act and your basic responsibilities to have your contingency plans ready means you expose your students and people to life-threatening mass shooting, or terrorism incidents at campus events. 

The very basic requirement to comply with the Clery Act is to establish a dedicated critical emergency communication and mass notification that could ensure campus safety. According to the Clery Act, universities or colleges must reveal their steps to controlling threats on campus and the inability to comply with the law may draw penalties for them.

The rapid frequency of campus critical events are a growing concern for higher education and its students. The Clery Act provides guidelines on how universities and colleges can keep their students informed as emergency incidents are unleashing.

According to the act, the critical event management platform must emphasize on critical communications to alert its stakeholders and help them with the rapid preparedness process. Additionally, the critical communication must provide real-time feed to its students and keep them informed of the situations. By providing visual risk intelligence and location intelligence,  Zapoj helps avoid information fatigue and deliver the right message with its mass notification or emergency alerting system. To simply put, Zapoj Critical Event Management can provide data analytics and reporting, simplifying compliance with the Clery Act.

Conclusion

Critical event management platform Zapoj builds a robust recovery plan to combat catastrophic events at campus. To be compliant with the Clery Act and most importantly ensure campus safety, higher education needs AI-powered risk intelligence and emergency communication tools. Using its location intelligence, situational awareness, and mass notification capabilities, Zapoj helps bolster campus security and provides a safe environment for everyone associated with the campus community including your students, faculty, and staff.

If it is a campus event or natural disaster, Zapoj keeps your people informed and safe and to the best of its potential, it encourages resiliency.