Incident Recovery & Review

The services

Our incident recovery services are focused on delivering safe and effective recovery from incidents, as well as developing and implementing roadmaps that build a more resilient organisation capable of winning back the trust of people and organisations they serve. Activities include:

• Prioritising critical systems and data for restoration
• Coordination of recovery efforts across different teams
• Assisting identify constraints, dependencies, and priorities in the recovery process, and building these into a recovery plan
• Developing secure rebuild processes for compromised systems to bring back systems in a clean state
• Development of cyber uplift roadmaps with detailed prioritisation, time and cost estimates, and other delivery constraints
• Identification and implementation of tactical security controls to immediately increase the security controls around specific environments/assets or an entire technology estate

For incidents that have been resolved, we deliver high quality and high impact Post Incident Reviews (PIRs) - extracting valuable lessons to enhance future resilience. The nature of our PIRs changes significantly based on the audience they are intended for - from high level root cause reports targeted at senior management and boards on enterprise wide lessons to more technology-focused analysis of contributing weaknesses in the control environment. Our PIRs can include:

• Identifying root causes of the incident and contributing factors
• Identifying opportunities that would have prevented the incident
• Identifying opportunities to have detected the incident sooner, and details of where incidents were detected but not responded to
• Analysing the incident timeline and response effectiveness
• Assessing the impact on business operations and reputation
• Evaluating the effectiveness of existing security controls
• Developing detailed and prioritised recommendations based on lessons learned
• Proposing updates to incident response plans and procedures
• Suggesting improvements to detection and prevention capabilities

PIRs are often conducted under the direction of a law firm. Germane Advisory can work alone, with a law firm of your choice, or we can recommend a firm to you.

The problems we help address

Our recovery services help minimise the impact from cyber incidents and enhance future resilience. It helps organisations:

• Return to normal operations quickly and securely
• Rebuild stakeholder trust by effective communication and cogent plans about the steps they are taking to enhance resilience
• Reduce the likelihood and impact of future incidents

Our post incident reviews help organisations:

• Systematically improve cyber defences based on the real-world experience of an incident in the context of their organisation’s systems and business arrangements
• Provide confidence to senior management and board stakeholders that root causes of major incidents have been identified and a plan has been developed to remediate them
• Through sharing the high-level themes, provide confidence to external stakeholders that the incident was taken seriously and there is commitment to learn from the incident and enhance resilience
• Identify how plans and playbooks should be updated to make the organisation more prepared for future incidents
• Meet contractual requirements for incident reporting and remediation
• Reduce the likelihood and impact of future incidents
• Bridge gaps between technical teams and business leadership
• Turn lessons learned into actionable improvements

The difference we strive for

Germane Advisory's approach to Incident Recovery & Review is future-focused and value-minded. We don't just aim to return you to your pre-incident state - we strive to help you emerge stronger and more resilient - positioning you to regain community and customer trust. Our creative problem-solving skills come to the fore as we help you turn the challenge of recovery into an opportunity for meaningful improvement.

Our team has a depth of experience helping organisations recover from incidents and leading post incident reviews for some of Australia’s most significant cyber security incidents. Our experience tells us that there are as many lessons to learn outside of technology as there are within, because cyber crises are converged issues that touch on privacy, crisis management, data governance challenges, and business impacts. We apply our multidisciplinary experience to bring these issues to the fore.

We're pragmatic in our approach, focusing on recovery actions that deliver the most significant business value. We understand the pressure to resume normal operations quickly, but we balance this with the need for thorough, secure recovery. Our experience in crisis management allows us to help you navigate the complex decisions and trade-offs often required during the recovery process.

Our people-centric approach recognises that successful recovery and learning depend on effective collaboration across the organisation. We facilitate constructive, blame-free reviews that focus on systemic improvements rather than individual fault-finding. We're passionate about helping you extract maximum value from the incident experience, turning a negative event into a catalyst for positive change.

With Germane Advisory, you're not just recovering from an incident - you're seizing an opportunity to materially change your approach to organisational resilience.