Risk & Security Management Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Risk & Security Management - Essay Example Today, researchers are plagued by the difficulty to define emergency, disaster, and crisis and, more importantly, by the difficulty in distinguishing these definitions and concepts from one another. Modern literature generally defines emergency as â€Å"actual or threatened accidental or uncontrollable events that are concentrated in time and space, in which a society, or a relatively self-sufficient subdivision of a society undergoes severe danger, and incurs such losses to its members and physical appurtenances that the social structure is disrupted and the fulfillment of all or some of the essential functions of the society, or its subdivision is prevented† (Fischer 1998). In other words, an emergency situation is always about accidental or the risk of accidental events that are both uncontrollable and are concentrated in time in space. Emergency is anything that involves or causes the inevitable disruption of the critical social or organizational functions: for example, th e breach of the computer system is naturally followed by the organization’s inability to process its customer information effectively (Moore & Lakha 2006). Objectively, the discussed definition of emergency implies that before security and risk managers can call the situation â€Å"a disaster†, the major social and organizational functions must be severely disrupted (Culp 2002, Roper 1999). In this sense, it would be correct to assume that emergency is the starting point and is the first stage of crisis development which, if not prevented and addressed, will readily transform into what managers call ‘a disaster’.