Integrated services to enable effective business disruption recovery

There is not a week that goes by without a data breach at a major company or downtime for a service provider. Power outages have brought down entire major cities, and business interruptions have plagued even the largest companies. Nobody is immune, and middle market companies must develop a consistent strategy to overcome any type of business disruption.

All businesses eventually suffer a disaster scenario, whether from a serious weather event, cybersecurity attack or even a terrorist attack. When it happens to your company, what do you do? You have to act quickly and decisively to determine what it was, how it happened and how to recover. In a disaster event, you must have the right plan and resources in place to understand the situation and what steps to take next to sustain your business.

By its nature, a disaster creates a hectic environment within your organization. When it occurs, you typically do not know whether it is an information technology issue, an operations issue, a building issue or a combination of concerns. You also often do not know whether the event is purposeful or accidental. What you do know is that you need to identify the source and execute  processes in order to ensure that your business keeps going.

Many organizations are increasingly reliant on technology to perform key operations. If those solutions are not available, productivity can grind to a halt. Companies now have few manual downtime procedures, and those that do exist can only be performed for a finite period of time before the data volume becomes untenable.

In addition, regulators in several industries are placing more emphasis on how companies plan for and recover from catastrophic events. For example, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) have caused a significant shift in how personal data must be protected and stored, and enhanced financial regulations establish a higher standard for system stability and availability.

Clients are now asking their providers, suppliers and business partners for proof that planning, documentation and security is at the same level or better than their own internal capabilities. In turn, service providers are leveraging their defined processes and mature response and recovery capabilities as differentiating factors to separate themselves from their competition.

In a disaster event, you need timely resources that can step in and help your organization at every level, from the initial investigation through response, remediation and recovery. RSM provides solutions that come together seamlessly to help ensure that both your business processes and your technology return to full functionality as quickly as possible following a disaster, providing the tools and capabilities you need to recover.

When you first learn that a disruption has occurred, you must find the source of the event and determine the impact to your business. If the event affects your ability to operate—whether it is cyber or physical—an efficient, prompt response is critical to maintaining business operations and minimizing the financial impact and reputational damage. Our risk advisory team provides several key disaster recovery and incident response services, including:

• Incident response investigative services: Identifying, collecting, preserving and examining digital information to help you reduce the impact of an incident, eradicate the threat and get on the road to recovery
• Breach assessment and malware analysis: After an incident is contained, understanding the source of the disruption and how it occurred
• Ransomware assessment: Providing concrete validation of your susceptibility to ransomware and how it could affect business processes

Your technology systems, including those that store key data, are at an acute risk during a disaster, and getting them back operating at full capacity is a priority. Our security and technology advisors can prepare you to respond quickly and confidently following any business disruption by designing and installing business resilience solutions that can back data up, replicate it, and secure and protect it following an incident. We provide a data recovery foundation that you can utilize to resume your key processes, with several options including:

• Disaster recovery-as-a-service: Creating an effective, secure environment to maintain your data
• Cloud-based replication: Replicating your virtual machines to alternate geographic locations for quicker response and fail-over capabilities
• Private cloud backup solutions: The highest level of reliability and safety through redundant systems, redundant internet connections, routine backups and comprehensive disaster recovery
• Cloud backup-as-a-service: Checking that backups are reliable and complete with governance built in
• Security architecture design and implementation: Critical to safeguarding your network, data and client files
• Storage and recovery systems: Offering insight into technologies that can help your business meet its strategic business objectives with right-sized solutions
• Patch management: Keeping your systems up to date with the latest patches, the most current version releases and best practice solutions and processes
• Security training: Training programs for your workforce to help prevent intrusion and data loss
• Program management and testing: Developing recurring, sustainable processes for ensuring that documented plans and processes remain current and align with business goals

A key element in surviving a disaster event is preparation for unforeseen disruptions. Disasters can happen at any time and can come from a growing list of sources. Therefore, your protective measures must evolve to encompass new risks as well as your internal technological and organizational changes.

Our risk advisory team can help your business plan for an event, with business continuity and disaster recovery services that mitigate physical and financial damage and establish a foundation to get you back on your feet as quickly as possible. Our five-step approach helps you feel confident in your readiness for unforeseen disruptions:

• Program initiation: Reviewing any existing policies, documents and roles and responsibilities
• Requirements definition: Assessing threats and mitigation efforts, business impact drivers and recovery objectives
• Strategy determination: Aligning recovery requirements with current capabilities while remediating any gaps
• Plan development, initiation and documentation: Developing recovery plans, business continuity plans, incident and crisis management plans, and failback considerations
• Program management: Activities to enable consistent exercise schedules, process and documentation reviews, and awareness and training activities

While there are many organizations that can provide incident response, disaster recovery or business continuity planning, very few have the depth and breadth of experience to tell the whole story. Our extensive risk advisory and technology knowledge and national resources come together to provide a unified solution to help limit the damage a business disruption can have to your business—regardless of the source.

In addition, we can supplement your existing plans with our technology and advisory services. For example, if you have an incident response plan in place, we can provide guidance on how to enhance it in order to further protect your organization. We understand that you have a finite budget and resources constraints, and we deliver solutions to help you know where you need to invest in your security and risk management efforts, in order to minimize your risks and potential impacts.