Fusion Risk Management: Business Continuity Redefined

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David Nolan, CEO & Founder

It was in 2017 when the Fusion Risk Management’s CEO and Founder David Nolan saw his company secure $41 million in funding. It was a cause for celebration, and Nolan decided to tip his hat to his alma matter. He and his wife, Nikki donated $125,000 toward an entrepreneurship program at Villanova University, where they met some 40 years ago. Interestingly enough, the year also marked their 35th wedding anniversary.

Fusion since then has been providing business continuity and risk management software platform to organizations, including Fortune 500 companies. “We realized that heat maps, risk registers and insurance policies really didn’t do anything for that. It was a very small consolation prize to get an insurance check as your company goes out of business… Today it’s about how do you protect your brand, and how do you protect your identity as a trusted business partner, and that’s where we come in,” informs Nolan.

Indeed, it has been a long journey for Nolan. The passionate CEO has been instrumental in driving Fusion’s innovation and growth. “Most people see the upside and energy we have today. Only a select few know how incredibly rough our road was and an epic financial crisis made things unbelievably difficult,” states Nolan. Fusion has continued to grow while enabling and empowering different multi-million organizations to manage risk more effectively and efficiently. Nolan informs, “Our growth trajectory is a signal that our strategy is working.” Fusion works with some of the largest companies in the world and counts around 80 Fortune 500 firms among its clientele, along with many companies as small as 500 employees or less. The team has seen firsthand how important having a plan in place, besides just property and casualty insurance or business interruption coverage, is to a company’s brand.

Designed to engage employees in incident response, safety and security, the company’s Fusion Framework System includes integrated business impact analysis and risk assessment, plan development and activation, crisis/incident management, exercises and simulations, integrated risk management and mobile and enterprise communities. The framework creates not only tailored engaging experiences, it also automates much of the administration workload, and establishes an information foundation that can be used to make better decisions. Built on the Salesforce Lightning Platform, the award-winning management software solution enables business resilience by delivering world-class methodology and award-winning management software that has proven to meet business continuity challenges better than any of the competitors in the marketplace.

Fusion is all about delivering management software and solutions for organizations to achieve enterprise resilience aligned to executives’ fiscal and fiduciary responsibility, customer commitments, regulatory requirements and stakeholder expectations

While the traditional software tools only focus on developing contingency plans without the context of business drivers and risks needed to understand what level of resilience, Fusion provides the management software and methodology which enables organizations to quickly address these challenges and gain these capabilities in a way that is effective, efficient and economical. “Achieving enterprise resilience is very challenging. It requires understanding how an enterprise functions and how it breaks, mapping dependencies from suppliers through to customers, continuously assessing the current state of the enterprise, developing capabilities to maintain operations at time of crisis, and actually responding successfully to disruptive events,” states Nolan. “Fusion is all about delivering management software and solutions for organizations to achieve enterprise resilience aligned to executives’ fiscal and fiduciary responsibility, customer commitments, regulatory requirements and stakeholder expectations.” A cloud-based management system for building programs, the Fusion Framework System helps organizations in taking the next step toward business impact analysis. The solution can assist the clients in creating an information foundation based on organizational data to assess risks and identify and manage their most important areas of impact.

Through the Fusion Framework System, organizations are enabled to flexibly model their business continuity plan by building a clear and comprehensive understanding of risks and impacts. They can create, manage, and test any combination of plans in a seamless manner across all relevant disruption scenarios, and also leverage ENS, ITSM, and enterprise systems in one central location for better command and control and faster recoveries at a time of crisis. Further, the system also delivers effective reporting and metrics to drive executive understanding and decision-making, and enable the organizational executives to prioritize investments in resilience, response, and recovery. Through its state-of-the-art system, the company has helped numerous renowned firms in achieving their desired level of outcomes. One case that stands out is Fusion’s collaboration with a cloud content platform for the modern age, which was struggling because they didn’t have a singular source of accurate, reliable data. As a result, they had to spend valuable time pulling information from various systems or departments. They needed a one stop shop where they’d be able to visualize and meet their strategic objectives while continuing to support the company’s core values. And that’s where Fusion came into the picture.

The Fusion Framework System allowed the cloud content platform to tailor the system to meet its needs and goals so it can scale and develop as it grows. Thanks to its information foundation, the business could now deliver reports and metrics that gave insightful, actionable data such that leadership can make informed, confident decisions. The client wanted something that they could drive and make their own, and that's exactly what Fusion delivered. While the other systems don’t allow clients to do that and they are stuck with what they have been given by the vendors, the whole process and end-result can get very frustrating, very quickly. Being able to tailor a system to the needs and goals so that cloud content platform could scale and develop as they grow—as an organization and as a program—the Fusion Framework System proved to be the ultimate solution for the client.

Having carved a unique niche for itself in the business continuity space, Fusion aims to improve efficiency of collaboration with partners in the future. To this end, the company has included a new third-party management offering along with a solution for organizations to securely connect with broader internal and external communities in their most recent product release. With these new enhancements, organizations now have the most flexible and innovative way to manage and mitigate risk to the perimeter of their enterprises and throughout their supply chain. The new capabilities announced will enable Fusion Framework System users to engage vendors and other third-party communities directly in a completely integrated system. This helps to efficiently manage the otherwise resource-intensive vendor assessment process and incorporate third parties directly into broader risk management and resiliency strategies. By automating data collection, Organization, and analysis, Fusion clients can better leverage limited resources to ensure a more effective, efficient, and economical risk management program. “These enhancements significantly extend Fusion’s third-party management capabilities while still delivering capabilities applicable to all aspects of risk management,” mentions Nolan. “This is in line with Fusion’s vision to provide organizations with command and control through a single pane of glass.”

"Today it’s about how do you protect your brand, and how do you protect your identity as a trusted business partner, and that’s where we come in"

To advance and expand further, Fusion has also promoted a number of employees into key leadership roles and plans to further expand its employee base in its Chicago and London offices. “We are very proud of the culture here at Fusion having recently been named one of Built in Chicago’s 2019 Best Places to Work and Most Innovative in Risk Management Solutions by CorporateLiveWire,” says Fusion’s Chief Revenue Officer, Paul Ybarra. “This leadership team is well positioned to lead Fusion to even greater success in 2019 and beyond.”

- Shiv Shanker
March 22, 2019