Do you use a mass notification tool to communicate with users in the event of cyber or other significant incidents? Please add comments if you'd like to share which and whether you rate it.

We use Everbridge, it works well.  

At my current employer we use Everbridge for emergency reporting, at my old work we used Rave.

We use AlertMedia for mass notifications which I would consider an out of band process.  We also use this for weather events, office closures, etc.

In incident planning of unknown severity and duration, relying on a corporate tools and rigid recovery and communication plans is unwise and overly optimistic. If the digital era has taught us anything, it is that the velocity and reach of #social will generally be more powerful than hierarchical process-based structures and systems.

Outsourcing the whole productivity, collaboration and messaging stack to Azure cloud was a big step to increasing the resilience and reachability of the organisation and our partners. But in the event even that tenant were unreachable, encouraging parallel informal networks on whatsapp and telegram (which in our geographical area is already ubiquitous) is the main way in which communication is achieved. The plans include reaching out to these networks and encouraging re-communication.

The old adage to the question, Yes, and it depends. One size does not fit all, neither does when the notification needs to be timely and effective. We do have options for situation awareness notification versus target or special notifications, depending on the incident.