Leadership is essential in an organization. Establishing a leadership hierarchy helps teams avoid getting confused about who to turn to with questions and concerns, allowing them to focus their efforts where needed. High-quality leadership is vital to success but becomes even more important when the pressure to resolve an issue with minimal downtime is turned up.
Incidents are unavoidable when running a business. When an incident does inevitably occur, communication is critical while your teams are working to minimize the impact and expedite a solution. For technical resolvers, the first steps during an incident are to look for any leads that point to the source of the issue. Customer service and communications teams, however, must prioritize establishing effective communication with impacted users. Both teams have the right frame of mind, they need to be aligned. This becomes more complicated when such an incident is an outage.
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, it sent ripples through many markets. Ukrainian car factories which supplied Europe were interrupted, oil and gas supply from Russia was throttled, and the supplies of steel, sunflowers, corn, and wheat were affected. Prices of sugar and petroleum surged, a threat of long-lasting high inflation emerged, and social unrest began to foment, with cyber-attacks coming both out of and going into Russia.
Regardless of your organization’s size, industry, or security measures, you will inevitably face IT incidents. But what do you do if an incident affects a critical system and your on-call responders can’t resolve it? Does your team have a set of clearly outlined next steps they should take to handle the issue? Answering these questions can be complicated, even more so for large organizations that rely on cloud-based services to fuel their IT environment.
