The CRISC Certification for Controlling Information System Risk
CRISC Risk Mitigation ConsultingThe Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control (CRISC) program was established by ISACA in 2010 to verify an IT professional's ability to design, deploy, and maintain information system controls to manage network risk. Progent can provide the services of a CRISC-certified consultant to help you identify, quantify, mitigate, and monitor risks throughout your information network, including both technology and business processes.

Progent can also help you create and implement a risk management strategy based on leading practices promoted by CRISC and geared to align with your company's risk tolerance, business objectives, and IT budget. Areas covered by Progent's risk management services include business continuity planning and disaster recovery preparedness. Progent's risk management services are complementary to the services available from Progent's CISA-certified cybersecurity audit consultants and Progent's CISM-certified cybersecurity management experts.

Progent's Support for CRISC Focus Areas
The CRISC (pronounced "see-risk") certification program verifies a candidate's hands-on work experience and exhaustively tests skills in specific areas of risk management:

  • Risk identification
  • Risk assessment
  • Risk response and mitigation
  • Risk and control monitoring and reporting
Progent offers a comprehensive selection of consulting services for each of the risk management domains defined by CRISC.

Risk Identification
This area of risk management covers gathering the information needed to create a risk management strategy that is relevant to your business. Consulting services offered by Progent in this area include:

  • Collect information and review documentation to make sure you identify and evaluate significant risk scenarios.
  • Identify legal, regulatory, and contractual requirements and organizational policies and standards related to your information system to determine their potential impact on your business goals.
  • Identify potential threats and vulnerabilities for your business processes, associated data, and supporting capabilities to assist in evaluating your enterprise risk.
  • Create and maintain a risk register to make sure all identified risk factors are considered.
  • Compile risk scenarios to estimate the likelihood and impact of significant events that could disrupt your business.
  • Develop a risk awareness program and conduct training to make sure your stakeholders understand information system risk so they can contribute to your risk management process.
  • Match identified risk scenarios to your associated business processes to help determine risk ownership.
  • Validate risk appetite and risk tolerance with your senior leadership and key stakeholders to make sure they are in agreement.
Risk Assessment
This area of risk management involves the analysis and evaluation of IT risk in order to drive strategic risk management decisions that provide optimal support for business objectives. Consulting services offered by Progent in this area include:
  • Frame the analysis of identified risk scenarios in the context of your company's structure, policies, and control mechanisms in order to assess each scenario's likelihood and consequences.
  • Review existing risk controls and assess their ability to reduce information system risk.
  • Study the findings of risk and control analysis to identify possible disconnects between the actual and intended readiness of your risk management environment.
  • Make sure that risk ownership is properly assigned to clarify the chain of accountability.
  • Review risk assessment findings to appropriate stakeholders to inform risk management strategy.
  • Incorporate the risk assessment findings in the risk register.
Risk Response and Mitigation
This area of risk management involves developing and implementing risk responses to ensure that risk factors and events are handled effectively and in line with your business goals and IT budget. Consulting services offered by Progent in this area include:
  • Identify and evaluate risk response options and provide your management with information needed to make sensible decisions about responding to risk.
  • Review risk responses with your relevant stakeholders to validate efficiency, effectiveness, and economy.
  • Apply risk criteria to help you develop the risk profile for approval by your management.
  • Help you develop risk response action plans to address risk factors identified in your organizational risk profile.
  • Help you develop business cases supporting your investment plan to make sure risk responses are aligned with your business goals.
Risk and Control Monitoring and Reporting
This area of risk management addresses monitoring risk and communicating information to your relevant stakeholders to ensure the continued effectiveness of your company's risk management strategy. Support services available from Progent in this area include:
  • Collect and validate data that measure key risk indicators (KRIs) to monitor and communicate their status to associated stakeholders.
  • Monitor and communicate key risk indicators (KRIs) and management activities to assist your relevant stakeholders in their decision-making process.
  • Facilitate independent risk assessments and risk management process reviews to ensure they are performed efficiently and effectively.
  • Identify and report on risk, including compliance, to initiate corrective action and meet business and regulatory requirements.
  • Interview process owners and review process design documentation to gain an understanding of your business process objectives.
  • Design information systems controls in consultation with process owners to make sure they meet your business goals.
  • Help identify the people, infrastructure, information, and other resources needed to implement and manage IS controls at an optimal level.
  • Implement information systems controls to mitigate risk.
  • Help define metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) so you can measure your information systems control performance in meeting business goals.
  • Provide documentation and training to make sure your IS controls are performed effectively.
  • Assess and recommend tools and techniques to automate your information system control verification processes.
  • Make sure all your controls are assigned to owners who take responsibility for them.
  • Establish control criteria to allow you to perform control life cycle management.
Other Fault Tolerant Technologies Provided by Progent's Consultants
Progent's Microsoft and Cisco-certified consultants can assist you to build an affordable, zero-downtime system that addresses key issues covering a broad array of networking technologies and operations such as:

Business Continuity Planning
Progent's disaster recovery planning professionals can help you design a business continuity plan so you can resume IT operations in the event of an information system disaster. Progent can help you to define a complete disaster recovery plan that includes periodic disaster recovery assessments and drills. Progent's Microsoft and Cisco-authorized engineers can also help you build an affordable, non-stop network architecture that addresses availability issues covering a broad array of infrastructure technologies and processes. For more information, see Business Continuity Consulting Services.

Managed Cloud Backup: ProSight Data Protection Services
ProSight Data Protection Services from Progent provide small and mid-sized businesses an affordable and fully managed service for reliable backup/disaster recovery. For a fixed monthly price, ProSight Data Protection Services automates and monitors your backup activities and enables rapid restoration of vital files, applications and virtual machines that have become unavailable or corrupted due to component failures, software glitches, disasters, human mistakes, or malicious attacks like ransomware. ProSight Data Protection Services can help you protect, retrieve and restore files, folders, apps, system images, plus Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware images/. Critical data can be backed up on the cloud, to a local device, or mirrored to both. Progent's cloud backup consultants can provide world-class support to configure ProSight Data Protection Services to to comply with regulatory standards such as HIPPA, FIRPA, and PCI and, whenever needed, can help you to restore your business-critical data. Learn more about ProSight Data Protection Services Managed Backup.

Windows Server 2016 Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
Progent's Windows Server 2016 disaster recovery/business continuity experts can assist you to plan and deploy a DR system built around Microsoft's latest Failover Clustering technologies including Cluster Operating System Rolling Upgrade for non-disruptive migration to Windows Server 2016, Storage Replica for crash-consistent Recovery Point Objective (RPO), Storage Spaces Direct for enterprise-class storage clusters using commodity equipment, VM Load Balancing for improving the performance and resilience of Failover Clusters while reducing capital investment and operational expenses, and Cloud Witness for fast, affordable deployment of a stretch cluster quorum witness. For details, see Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Help.

Windows Server 2012 Failover Clusters
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 introduced world-class fault tolerance and system recovery to Microsoft's failover clustering platform. Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 adds to this technology and delivers significant enhancements offering increased extensibility, non-stop disk storage availability for server applications, simpler management, faster failover, and additional flexibility for designing clusters. To find out more, visit Windows Server 2012 Clustering Consulting and Support.

VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) Disaster Recovery Solutions
VMware's Site Recovery Manager is an extension to VMware vCenter that lets you specify, automate and test a repeatable runbook for recovering services rapidly after a breakdown. Site Recovery Manager supports centrally managed and automated disaster recovery, application mobility, plus transparent site migration, failback and site re-protect. Site Recovery Manager also allows non-intrusive testing for disaster recovery, updates and fixes and can generate reports to verify complete service recovery, validate Service Level Agreements and demonstrate compliance. Progent can provide the skills of a VCDX certified VMware SRM consulting expert to help your organization to design, configure, test and maintain a disaster recovery solution powered by VMware SRM.

NetApp MetroCluster High Availability and Disaster Recovery Technology
NetApp MetroCluster is a high-availability and disaster recovery software suite that uses array-based storage clustering along with synchronous replication to deliver rapid, zero data loss disaster recovery between sites that are as far as 185 miles (300km) away from one another. Progent offers the skills of a certified NetApp MetroCluster expert who can assist your business to design, deploy, administer, upgrade, test and troubleshoot a disaster recovery system built around NetApp MetroCluster. Progent can help you to select an architecture for your MetroCluster deployment that aligns with your functional needs and budget. Progent can make sure you adhere to best practices for configuring your MetroCluster environment by providing guidance with tasks like assigning disk pools, arranging aggregate and plexes layout, provisioning NetApp FlexVol volumes, setting up NetApp Snapshot, provisioning switches, designing a tiebreaker, setting up a configuration replication network between your peered clusters, and verifying your MetroCluster disaster recovery solution to verify adherence with information assurance standards and regulatory mandates.

Network Load Balancing
Progent provides high availability load balancing support covering network load balancing, load balanced applications, LAN/WAN backbone routing, and content delivery technology including Cisco Content Engine. Fault tolerant load balancing solutions for which Progent offers consulting services include Windows 2003 and 2008 Server Network Load Balancing Manager, Citrix Metaframe and Access Gateway, Cisco Content Services Switch, Cisco Distributed Director and Cisco CDN Software, and F5 Networks 3-DNS. To learn more, see Non-stop Load Balancing.

Zero Downtime Colocation
Progent's Data Center consultants can help you identify fault-tolerant data centers that match the specific requirements of your company. Fault tolerant collocation sites are particularly appealing to small and mid-size organizations due to of their low cost and simplified logistics in comparison to pursuing a do-it-yourself approach. Attempting to build an on-site data center with even a minimum degree of fault tolerance is too costly for typical small businesses. Progent is ready to help you reap all the advantages of 24x7 colocation facilities by offering a full array of consulting and support services. To find out more, see High-Availability Colocation Solutions.

24x7 Interoffice Connectivity
Progent’s inter-site connectivity professionals can help companies create fault tolerant branch office connections via redundant networks featuring automatic failover. Progent’s Cisco-premier CCIE network engineers can plan and deploy high-availability Inter-office networks based on zero-downtime EIGRP network routers or fault tolerant OSPF deployment of Cisco routers. Progent can demonstrate how multi-path connectivity and transparent fail-over can provide economical 24x7 interoffice networking. For more information, see Non-stop Interoffice Connectivity.

Non-stop Internet Connectivity
Progent's Cisco-authorized network engineers can help you build an affordable, high availability Internet connection solution that can achieve 24x7 Internet connectivity through a wide array of fault tolerant Internet access solutions including fault tolerant BGP, automatic fail-over, and redundant Internet Service Providers. Progent can provide CCIE consultants to help you apply the latest techniques for 24x7 Internet connections to implement an affordable, completely redundant Internet network with automatic failover and other capabilities to create zero-downtime Internet availability. For details, go to High Availability Internet Access Architecture.

Backup and Restore Solutions Consultants
Progent offers economical online support from engineers skilled in a wide range of products and services that deliver solutions for protecting Windows, Apple Mac, and Linux/UNIX physical and virtual servers and desktops as well as laptops and smartphones. Progent can provide expertise for leading backup products including Acronis, Backup Exec, BackupAssist Software, CrashPlan, Double-Take, MozyPro, Retrospect for Macintosh, Apple Time Machine, VMware Data Recovery, and Solaris FLARs. Progent's consultants can assist you to install, upgrade, or troubleshoot data backup solutions for a range of architectures such as on-premises, remote, cloud-based, or a mix. For more information, visit Backup and Restore Technology Expertise.

Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) Data Recovery Consulting and Support Services
Progent's certified System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) engineers can help your company to develop an effective disaster recovery plan, design a cost-effective high-availability IT infrastructure, deploy a System Center Data Protection Manager-based recovery system, thoroughly validate your system, train your IT staff or regular service providers how to manage SCDPM, or provide extensive IT support outsourcing including remote hosting of System Center Data Protection Manager machines in Progent's secure data center facility. To learn more, visit System Center Data Protection Manager Expertise.

Barracuda Backup On-premises and Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery
Barracuda Backup is an affordable, subscription backup/restore platform for small and medium-size businesses. A Barracuda Backup deployment can incorporate a custom-designed hardware storage device manufactured by Barracuda or a virtual appliance with similar functionality but which utilizes your existing storage hardware. Barracuda Backup safeguards vital business data produced on-premises, at one or multiple remote locations, or in the cloud. For disaster protection, you can replicate data to the Barracuda Cloud, to Amazon Web Services (AWS), or to any location with a physical or virtual Barracuda appliance. Progent is a certified Barracuda partner and Progent's Barracuda Backup consultants can provide a broad range of consulting support services to assist you to design, configure, manage and repair a backup and disaster recovery system built on Barracuda Backup. For details, visit Barracuda Backup and disaster recovery consulting and management.

Altaro VM Backup Software for Data Protection and Disaster Recovery
Altaro VM Backup software provides small and mid-size organizations a reliable and affordable solution for backing up and recovering Hyper-V and VMware-based virtual machines (VMs). Altaro VM Backup can be used for local, remote, multi-site, and cloud-hosted environments and also supports cost-effective backup to Azure Block Blob storage. Headline features include state-of-the-art Augmented Inline Deduplication to reduce backup storage requirements, Continuous Data Protection with backup spacing as short as five minutes for minimizing your Recovery Point Objective, advanced encryption, item-level restore capability for specific files and emails, support for Windows Server Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) and for vCenter for managing large-scale deployments, and support for Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service to back up live virtual machines without downtime. Progent is an Altaro partner and can provide a wide range of consulting services to help you to plan, install, manage and troubleshoot a backup/restore solution based on Altaro VM Backup software. For more information, visit Altaro VM Backup Certified Consultants.

Consulting for Double-Take Software for Data Backup and Recovery
Double-Take Software offers a selection of tools intended to provide small and midsize companies a range of cost-effective solutions for replicating and recovering vital applications including Exchange, SQL, RIM Blackberry, and Microsoft Office SharePoint. Progent’s business continuity planning experts have extensive experience integrating Double-Take products into small business information systems to create a high level of availability and business continuity capability at a budget-friendly cost. To find out more, visit Consulting Services Double-Take Solutions for Data Backup.

Why Choose Progent for Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity Planning Solutions?
Because Progent is a Microsoft Partner and provides high-level application support for a broad variety of business software programs, Progent can assist clients to arrive at efficient IT solutions that optimize the productivity of your information system. As a Registered Partner with Cisco, Progent can provide the support of certified consultants and specialists with experience in designing, implementing and managing infrastructure environments based on Cisco technology. The extent of Progent's technical know-how and Progent's familiarity with the needs of small companies make Progent the perfect resource for building and maintaining an affordable, fault-tolerant network.

Other Credentials Earned by Progent's Cybersecurity and Information Assurance Consultants
In addition to offering the expertise of information assurance professionals with CRISC certification, Progent can also provide your business with access to CISM-certified security management consultants, CISSP-certified cybersecurity experts, CISSP-ISSAP certified cybersecurity architecture consultants, CISA-certified cybersecurity audit professionals, and GIAC-certified information assurance specialists.

Contact Progent for help from a CRISC-certified Risk Management Consultant
To learn how to receive support from a CRISC-certified risk management expert, phone Progent at 800-993-9400 or visit Contact Progent.

More topics of interest: