Challenge

Before implementing Onspring, ADT faced several challenges in their business continuity and disaster recovery planning processes.

With over 200 locations, 30,000 vendors and 22,000 employees, ADT’s operations span various business units, including Consumer Small Business (CSB) and ADT Solar. As ADT expanded its offerings, planning and coordination became much more difficult. They quickly recognized the need for a centralized system to manage their business continuity and disaster recovery plans.

“The biggest challenge is knowing what I don’t know,” says Polly College, Senior Business Continuity Manager for ADT. “We have over 30,000 vendors, and while we had a thorough vendor vetting process, there were still plenty of what ifs that needed a plan. What if Microsoft has a communication breakdown and we can’t use Teams? What is our alternative method for communicating amongst ourselves?”

While teams across the organization categorized their own vendors and College conducted BIAs, there was no central place to assess and organize for everyone.

“It was hard to share the knowledge across different people in different departments. To get to that information, you had to find John’s spreadsheet over here and Sally’s spreadsheet over there,” says College.

Ultimately, ADT had the same BCDR challenges that many enterprises face.

1. Disjointed Processes: Like many large companies, ADT’s departments operated in silos, resulting in a lack of communication and a fragmented approach to planning and coordination.
2. Lack of Centralized Information: There wasn’t a single, authoritative location to store and access business impact analyses, disaster recovery plans, and related documentation. This made it difficult to ensure consistency and accountability across the organization.
3. Limited Visibility: Executives and stakeholders had limited visibility into the status of comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery plans, making it challenging to assess preparedness and to make informed decisions.

Solutions

Business Impact Analysis

For the hundreds of people that complete ADT’s BIA surveys, College was able to configure company-specific fields within ADT’s forms. “You can do a survey to get three pieces of information, or you could do a survey to get 300 pieces of information,” says College.

And that information gets pulled back into Onspring to create dashboards and reporting. For example, the current form may include the completion date of the last DR exercises, when the next one is scheduled and if and when tabletop exercises have been completed.  They also capture landscape ecosystem group as well as production & recovery servers.

After the initial BIAs were completed, which took almost a year, College used Onspring to reevaluate every single one. This process was key to ensuring that all business applications were still relevant and beneficial.

“Now we do annual BIA refreshes and make sure that applications are still valid, we still have our same user base, and it still has the same impact to our businesses.”

When significant changes occur in the applications, BIAs are conducted more frequently. This ensures that any new or replaced application is evaluated for its impact on the business.

Disaster Recovery Planning & Activation

Regular DR plans help businesses better prepare for potential disasters and mitigate the impact on their operations. ADT’s plans are related specifically to their business impact analysis for each application. College credits Onspring’s workflow automation capabilities to streamline the planning and execution of business continuity and disaster recovery processes. Tasks and responsibilities are assigned to specific individuals, and notifications and reminders were automatically generated, ensuring accountability and timely completion.

“If we have an issue, we can activate the plan and Onspring takes the team through a very specific workflow that automatically moves through the team based on completion. It’s very easy to get notifications that take us right into Onspring, which tells the owner his or her tasks and how to complete them,” says College. “It’s a seamless way to make it through a plan, and we can expand or revise as needed.”

In Onspring, each DR plan relates to a specific application and is tested at least once a year, quarterly if it’s a new application. College also uses Onspring to measure leading indicators and lagging indicators to effectively manage incidents and improve their overall incident response capabilities.

Testing & Exercising