When the Alarms Sound: What a Good Agency Does When the Worst Happens

Moments like this define an agency far more than any award or campaign ever could. They reveal whether the systems beneath the surface are solid, whether teams can pivot at speed without panic, and whether communication holds steady when the rest of the market is spinning.

At GENE, that readiness is built into the rhythm of how we operate. Our Unlimited Support model means clients aren’t waiting in a queue when it matters most. They already have a team in motion, monitoring, patching, and communicating in real time.

Resilience isn’t something we switch on when things go wrong; it’s woven into the way we work, the processes we follow, and the tools we trust.. Every process, every patch, every partnership is designed to keep merchants moving forward even when the ecosystem around them falters. That’s what “taking care of the technology so clients can take care of business” really means.

The merchants we support operate at scale, across complex infrastructures, and our responsibility is to make sure that a threat never becomes a crisis. ISO-27001 accreditation keeps us accountable to that promise, but the culture behind it - calm, process-driven, quietly relentless - is what really matters.

What follows is a view from every side of that process: the client perspective, the strategic oversight, the engineering front line, and the operational core that holds it all together.

When a vulnerability breaks, our clients don’t want a lecture in CVE codes or patch diffs. They want to know one thing: are we safe?

My job is to make sure the answer arrives faster than the fear does.

We treat every emerging exploit as a communication event as much as a technical one. Within minutes, we issue a structured briefing - what we know, what we’re doing, and when they’ll next hear from us. That cadence is everything. Silence breeds anxiety; clarity restores control.

Our ISO frameworks mean we’ve rehearsed these scenarios down to muscle memory. But process alone isn’t what reassures clients; it’s tone. Calm, direct, never defensive. You can tell when an agency is scrambling because their language changes. We don’t scramble.

Our monitoring stack includes Sansec, which provides reactive security alerts - the kind that let us know if something slips through the net. But ideally, those alerts never fire. In the Adobe Commerce ecosystem, the real focus is proactive protection: staying fully patched and aligned with Adobe’s regular release cycle.

Our teams track Adobe’s patching schedule and allocate dedicated resources for each release, followed with automated testing to verify every deployment before it hits production. That process, combined with the structure of our Unlimited Support model, means potential vulnerabilities are handled before they ever become incidents.

If an alert does appear, it triggers an internal escalation workflow: our technical teams validate and act, I’m looped in to manage client communication, and the message to clients remains consistent and clear - this has happened, we’re aware of it, and you’re already covered.

By the time most merchants are refreshing for updates, our clients already have the facts, the fix, and the confidence that someone is steering.

Vulnerabilities are inevitable. What’s optional is chaos.

Every new exploit follows a familiar rhythm - disclosure, validation, remediation - and the difference between panic and poise lies entirely in how prepared you are before it begins.

At GENE, that preparation is built-in to our process. Our layered defence model combines prevention, detection, automation, and disciplined release management. When Adobe issues a security patch, it goes straight to the top of the list. Our automated pipelines prepare our projects and we’re ready to deploy those updates across environments within a couple of hours, supported by peer review, QA validation, and full audit trails to maintain confidence and control.

But patching isn’t just about speed. It’s about precision. The path a patch takes matters as much as the patch itself. Our automation ensures that fixes move from intelligence to implementation without introducing instability, while our engineering teams run parallel checks on infrastructure configurations to strengthen stacks during deployment.

And because every update runs through our automated testing and visual regression pipelines, we can deliver security improvements without disrupting performance or experience.

It’s a system built not on reaction, but on readiness - a framework that turns security response into a steady, predictable part of progress.

When an exploit starts hitting live stores, it’s not abstract - it’s lines of code behaving badly under pressure. That’s where my team lives.

We work in a loop of assess → contain → patch → validate. The first priority is always to make sure every environment is running the latest Adobe-provided security patch. Spoiler; If you’re a GENE client, you will be! When a vulnerability is disclosed and an official fix becomes available, that update goes straight to the top of our deployment queue.

In parallel, we audit and tighten firewall rules to add another layer of protection, making sure anything at the edge is locked down while the patch moves through the release process.

The hard part isn’t applying the patch; it’s ensuring it lands cleanly. That’s where our automated testing and visual regression pipelines come in - validating every core journey before and after deployment to make sure performance and user experience remain intact. The goal is always the same: a site that’s as stable as it is secure.

And because we’ve been through enough of these to know the drill, there’s no ego involved. Everyone knows their role, everyone communicates in shorthand, and everyone trusts the process. It’s the opposite of panic; it’s choreography.

When the pressure’s on, eCom Ops becomes the metronome that keeps tempo.

Our responsibility is to ensure that urgent updates don’t cause collateral damage - uptime, performance, and user experience have to remain steady even as we move fast. We achieve that through near-zero-downtime deployments, proactive patching workflows, and automated rollback options that mean we can act with confidence, not hesitation.

That consistency is what Unlimited Support is built on. We are a team of specialists already embedded within our clients’ platforms, continuously monitoring, testing, and improving. When a vulnerability emerges, we’re not assembling a response team; the team’s already there, watching the dashboard light up and moving before most people have opened the alert.

Monitoring is constant across tools like Sansec and New Relic, and alerts are calibrated to escalate only what matters. That’s how we stay proactive rather than reactive.

Every incident ends with a retrospective, logged and shared. ISO 27001 requires traceability, but our culture demands learning. We review what worked, what didn’t, and how we can make it smoother next time. It’s continuous improvement in its purest form.

What the Right Partner Looks Like

The right agency doesn’t promise immunity from attack - that would be naïve. What it promises is resilience: a system built on anticipation, not apology.

A good partner doesn’t hide behind ticket numbers or tech-speak; they explain, act, and report with composure. They don’t flood you with noise; they deliver outcomes. And when the internet catches fire, they don’t join the shouting, they just pick up the extinguisher.

Our job is to be the quiet constant in a noisy ecosystem…the partner who’s already working before you’ve even finished reading the alert.

The Evolution of Resilience

Cyberattacks are part of eCommerce evolution. Every exploit exposes not just a line of code, but the readiness of the teams behind it.

For us, readiness is a principle that runs through everything we do: our Unlimited Support model, our ISO accreditations, our automation, our communication, and our belief that good agencies make their clients feel unflappable.

Because the real test of partnership isn’t what happens when everything’s working perfectly. It’s how steady things feel when they’re not.