Businesses need secure communications to withstand disasters and crises that take primary infrastructure offline. But how can you securely stay in contact when your infrastructure is offline or compromised?

The solution: secure, out-of-band communication like ShadowHQ. Our unique platform gives your teams the tools to communicate and collaborate in a crisis, enabling faster responses and minimizing the incident’s impact.

That’s why our customers love us — we have the tools they need when every second matters. Otherwise, incidents may become more severe as they remain uncontained, which can risk compliance, harm your reputation, and increase the incident’s financial impact.

So, let’s break down the key reasons why we’ve continually earned and retained businesses across many industries.

What is Secure Communications?

Secure communications is an overarching term that describes a range of encrypted channels. Regarding ShadowHQ, our secure communications are out-of-band and offer the highest level of security.

Our platform is developed to give your teams backup communications to respond to a wide range of possible incidents, from cyberattacks to natural disasters.

Since its launch, our unique solution has appeared to various businesses across all industries. We’ve steadily gained new customers and earned their loyalty by offering a comprehensive, secure bunker so they rapidly respond and remain productive when faced with any crisis.

5 Reasons Why Our Customers Stay with ShadowHQ

Businesses across all industries have never been more concerned about security and compliance. These two focuses go hand-in-hand to protect the business and minimize the impact of various scenarios.

ShadowHQ has emerged as a leading provider of secure, out-of-band communications that gives our customers a backup channel to work together to resolve crises ranging from natural disasters to cyber-attacks. 

From running tabletop exercises and achieving maximum incident response readiness to ensuring compliance best practices — our platform supports all these use cases and more.

Related: What is Out-of-Band Crisis Management?

1. Access Important Files Whenever They’re Needed

In the face of a disaster, you can’t depend on existing file storage remaining intact. Yet, incident response plans and related policies are crucial to effectively navigating a crisis. 

Traditionally, the answer is to store physical copies of incident response plans and other important documents, so they’re still available. However, it’s too common for physical copies to not be updated regularly, reducing effectiveness or making them unusable.

“ShadowHQ ensures stakeholders across reliant functions understand what their role is in any given event.” — Steve Strout, Founder & CEO at XspeedStudio

ShadowHQ solves this problem by giving your teams secure file storage in our out-of-band bunker so they can find critical documents quickly and have confidence that they’re up to date.

While our customers typically choose us for secure communications, they also love the ability to have off-site document storage. Whatever happens to their primary infrastructure, our platform is ready and waiting to help teams mount a response.

Related: How to Build Your Business’s Critical Incident Response Team in 7 Steps

2. Rapid Incident Responses with Automated Playbooks

Static PDFs or physical documents detailing incident response plans will help you in a crisis. However, outdated information can significantly delay the resolution time or create even larger problems.

That’s why, on top of secure document storage for static plans, we offer a built-in Playbook Manager that can be easily updated, accessed, and executed when they’re needed.

“ShadowHQ and its Playbook Manager are invaluable; the platform centralizes critical information, ensuring compliance and rapid deployment capabilities that are crucial for minimizing downtime and mitigating risks effectively. It’s not just a tool — it’s an essential part of our strategy to stay ahead in an ever-evolving threat landscape.” — Taiga Walker, Cyber Threat analyst III at Arcadia

Beyond more effective management of responses, we offer automated features that can take care of early documentation and data captured at the beginning of response plans. 

Our platform lets you free up teams to start focusing on higher-impact tasks while our platform handles tedious but necessary tasks.

Related: Emergency Management: 8 Tips to Prepare for Any Disaster Scenario

3. Seamless Incident Management

Your incident management processes directly affect the damage caused, the extent of lasting negative effects, and the possibility of risking compliance. 

Managing incidents effectively keeps your company operational by minimizing harmful results or mitigating them entirely. Having comprehensive incident response plans, processes, and practices in executing them is necessary for incident management.

However, internal document storage and primary communications can be taken offline, so how do you respond?

“Great communications app! Helped me easily communicate with my team in an emergency.” — VP of IT at a technology company

ShadowHQ offers a secure bunker that is ready and waiting to keep your teams connected when facing an incident. IT and compliance teams can communicate, collaborate, and resolve incidents quickly thanks to having everything they need in an out-of-band virtual environment.

4. Always Encrypted Voice and Video Messaging

Communicating in a crisis is vital to recovering quickly and minimizing the damage. However, many crises can take down primary communication channels or compromise them.

For example, if you’re trying to contain a data breach, has the attacker gained access to your communication stack? If so, they’ll know everything you’re about to do before you do it.

Relying solely on your day-to-day methods of communication during a crisis creates a massive weak point in overall incident response, but what if comms are unavailable?

ShadowHQ solves this problem by offering encrypted voice and video communications that live outside of your IT infrastructure and typical daily communication channels. 

This is one of the main reasons why our customers love us — we keep your teams communicating and collaborating without missing a beat.

5. Valuable External and Internal Reporting Capabilities

Reporting is a crucial aspect of post-incident analysis, public disclosures, or abiding by compliance requirements. However, when facing a stressful incident with traditional tools, capturing the necessary data can be challenging.

Our platform offers the following built-in reporting capabilities:

• Full access to audit trails and message logs
• Configurable reporting based on your legal and compliance requirements
• Ready to meet data retention policies by supporting chain of custody requirements with secure storage and timestamps

We know organizations don’t only need to resolve the incident; they need to review results and meet reporting requirements. Our customers appreciate having all of these capabilities in one place so they can focus on resolutions and recovery.

Related: 5 Steps to Optimize Business Continuity Planning

Business Owners Love Our Unique Platform for Secure Communications

Secure communications are crucial for modern businesses to rapidly respond to a wide range of possible scenarios. While your daily communications should also be secure, ShadowHQ’s secure bunker gives your teams an alternative should primary methods be compromised or unavailable.

We’ve explored why our customers love our platform, but is it right for you? Leading cybersecurity research firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) and Research Director Ken Buckler recently profiled the ShadowHQ platform in an ‘On the Radar’ report. 

Ken says: “ShadowHQ is an extremely powerful tool. Speaking from my time as an active cybersecurity practitioner, having policy and playbook templates readily available is a massive time saver. From a market perspective, ShadowHQ is revolutionizing the incident response space. Its platform and Playbook Manager bring together critical functionality and practical features into a single, easy-to-use solution.”

Get your complimentary copy of the EMA report to learn how ShadowHQ can help you achieve secure communications.

Download the report.