First, an overall evaluation of their security infrastructure and the individuals that support the structure. iPremier used a third party vendor to handle IT systems and support. This may be an area of weakness and the service that is provided by Qdata should be looked at closely. Although it may be cost effective to use a thirdy party vendor for this service, it is important to constantly evaluate their service and infrastructure compliance.
Second, although Qdata manages iPremier’s IT systems it is important for iPremiere to have standard operating procudures and compliance standards. Preparing such documentation after an outage is the perfect time because a lot of what went wrong is still in their head and helps provide some ground level requirements. Once iPremier establishes their processes and procedures they should periodically “test” the process in a live drill. At my company we run several maintenance processes every month as well as disaster recovery testing once a year with some in between quarterly testing. It’s important to put the process, procedure and plan together, but equally important to test it in order to identify gaps. This process also needs to be written and locatable in the event it is needed for reference. Establishing a location for the process both in