We spoke with Scott Orth, CEO & Founder of Mode, about the growing risks companies face when their collaboration tools are compromised, how this impacts their ability to respond to cyberattacks, and why Mode is the solution organizations need to stay prepared.

Collaboration Platforms: A Growing Risk for Businesses

Over 80% of workers globally rely on collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack, and others for daily communication. (Gartner, 2021) These platforms have become essential for managing projects and sharing important information.

Yet, few organizations are prepared for the possibility that these tools could become impacted by a cyberattack.

What happens when conversations are monitored, data is breached, or accounts become unavailable entirely? Without a secure backup plan, company leaders, IT teams, and cybersecurity experts scramble to coordinate a response; while the rest of the organization struggles to continue important operations - often with no clear way to communicate.

That’s when the true cost of failed collaboration during a cyber incident becomes clear:

• The average cost of a data breach hit $4.88 million in 2024 (IBM, 2024). This includes rising costs associated to downtime and post-breach activity.
• When downtime is experienced due to an incident, is can costs companies an average of $5,600 per minute (Gartner).
• Only 18% of small business owners are confident they could fully recover from a cyberattack, lacking the preparation to overcome the impacts (Mastercard, 2023).
• The risk is real for many with 58% of companies worldwide still lack an incident response plan (S&P Global, 2023).

“Our mission is to ensure that every company can handle a cyber crisis with control, organization, security, and speed. That starts with giving teams a trusted space to communicate and coordinate their response.” – Scott Orth, Founder & CEO

Why Organizations Need a New Approach

While collaboration platforms have become a workplace staple, for many organizations they only gained widespread adoption after the COVID-19 pandemic forced the remote and hybrid workplace evolution. Many organizations are still catching up when it comes to addressing the risks of cyberattacks that impact these essential tools.

Unfortunately, that means most companies have no plan for responding to a cyberattack or loss of collaboration tools. But there's reason for all businesses to plan for these scenarios. According to IBM's 2024 Cost of a Data Breach report, not creating and testing an incident response plan can increase the average time to recover from a cyberattack by 54 days.

That delay can be costly - both financially and in lost trust from customers, partners, and employees.

Other organizations plan to rely on consumer apps like Signal or WhatsApp as a backup channel. While convenient, these apps aren’t designed for business-scale response. They lack admin controls, proper compliance features, and security safeguards - creating risks and disorganization when teams need reliability the most. Security risks are well-documented against WhatsApp and compliance fines are beginning to mount in the United States for the business use of consumer encrypted messaging apps that don’t offer data retention control.

The good news is that cybersecurity leaders are now starting to turn to out-of-band communication platforms - secure, purpose-built solutions that keep business teams connected when primary tools fail. This ensures critical work continues while the company recovers from an incident. When coupled with a well-prepared incident response plan, out-of-band communication tools can ensure organizations are ready to take control over crisis response.

For companies who choose to wait to address this, the risks are escalating. The average cost of a data breach has climbed by $1.02 million between 2018 and 2024 (IBM), driven by expenses like ransomware payments, containment and recovery activities, missed sales opportunities, cancelled contracts, reputational damage, legal expenses, insurance increases, and higher costs to acquire new customers.

Making things worse, cybercriminals are leveraging AI to automate and scale attacks, making every organization a potential target.

With the mass adoption of collaborationt tools and the rising threat of cyber incidents compromising them, organizations are ready for a better way to ensure business continuity and team collaboration.

“Out-of-band collaboration and cyber crisis platforms are an emerging solution. Many organizations understand crisis response in a general sense, but they now need to consider the security and compliance implications of a cyberattack. That’s where Mode comes in to help company leaders get it right.” – Scott Orth, Founder & CEO

Introducing Mode: Stay Ready With Secure Out-of-Band Collaboration for Any IT Crisis

Mode isn’t just another collaboration tool – it emerges in response to the massive adoption of Microsoft Teams and Slack as a critical component of an organization’s IT strategy. With a keen focus on helping organizations overcome cyberattacks and outages, it addresses a gap in most risk plans: secure, out-of-band communication for critical response and operations teams.

To accomplish this, Mode needed to bring together unique capabilities into a single platform to empower responders to easily activate their response plan at any time, ensuring teams can:

• Communicate securely via end-to-end encrypted messaging, voice, and video calls.
• Access encrypted playbooks and crisis documents from anywhere.
• Send mass notifications to keep employees informed and prevent confusion during an incident.
• Manage access and data retention to ensure a trusted and compliant environment for information sharing.
• Fast and seamless transition from compromised channels to their trusted Mode channels.

Picture this: You are a company executive, IT manager, or cybersecurity leader when a cyberattack hits your business. The entire company turns to you for instruction and clarity on how to proceed. But you have no way to clearly communicate and coordinate this response at scale…

An out-of-band war room is an essential tool for leaders to quarterback response work.

Every company has a physical emergency muster point - a designated safe spot during a fire or evacuation. But in today’s remote and hybrid work environments, where do teams go when the emergency is a cyberattack?

Mode is that digital muster point.

So, whether you choose Mode or another solution, the key to building a resilient modern workplace is to ensure your organization is prepared with a backup communication platform.

“We want to change the way organizations think about preparing for cyberattacks. Like any emergency response, communication is the foundation. Pre-built plans are important, but adapting in real time and problem solving on the fly is the reality for anyone involved in responding to the situation” – Scott Orth, Founder & CEO

Cybersecurity Regulations and Standards Are Driving Change

We’re part of a change in philosophy in the cybersecurity and IT risk approach. What was once about trying to stop all cyberattacks from occurring, is now about mitigating the impact of an attack when it does happen. Striking a balance is best. Its why incident response planning is one of the leading budget categories for CISOs who experience a breach and increased investment in cybersecurity.

And cybersecurity standards and regulations are starting to catch-up, highlight the need for secure, out-of-band communication and document storage:

• Cybersecurity frameworks like NIST CSF, CIS, and ENISA recommend secure back-up communication and document storage as a key part of cyber response plans.
• Regulations are also evolving, with Canada’s upcoming Bill C-26 requiring critical industries to develop incident response plans - often setting the stage for best practices across other sectors. There is also Guideline E-21 for OSFI regulated businesses in Canada, requiring these companies to develop operational resilience programs.
• In the U.S., the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) enforces strict incident preparedness standards for defense contractors.

These regulations and standards are taking into consideration the learnings from the past, as well as the risks ahead on the horizon. Every organization should use these regulations and standards as a beacon for best practices - whether they are regulated or not.

From Crisis to Continuity: Empower Your Team to Keep the Business Moving

At Mode, we’re committed to helping organizations build resilience. Our vision is a future where cyber incidents don’t cripple businesses - but instead become manageable disruptions.

Want to see how Mode can help your organization stay secure and operational during a cyber crisis? Book a demo today.

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Let’s work together to make resilience a reality for every business.