As we are all adjusting to this new reality of living and working in the time of COVID-19, the coronavirus, there is so much that we need to take into consideration. Clearly, the health and safety of our family and colleagues is priority number one – and the local authorities have provided guidance on how to maximize protection.
With the advent of more and more connected systems and devices, organizations are facing ever greater data security challenges. Moreover, with the accelerating cloudification of apps and even whole infrastructures, security professionals are also faced with the challenge of how to protect critical assets including personal and other sensitive data as well as IP.
You probably know this situation all too (painfully) well . . . A critical incident has hit. You get the alert and the race is on! First headache up on deck – coordinating all the stakeholders. You call, you email, you text – some people are available, some are not. Some might be sleeping, or just getting up in a completely different time zone.
When considering the state of critical incidents in 2019 – it’s no surprise that looking ahead to 2020, CISOs have one of the organization’s most challenging and stressful jobs. During the first half of the year alone 4.1 billion records were compromised, and the average cost of a data breach is now estimated at $3.92 million.
Let’s face it, managing a critical incident has never been a walk in the park. Even, in the “good old days,” before the great cloud revolution and the onslaught of digital transformations, an incident often meant mayhem. Processes were manual, time consuming, difficult to execute, document, and learn from. Getting all the right people in the “same room” at the right time – was nearly impossible. Lots of time was wasted chasing down the right folks.
Organizations need to continually ramp up and improve their security and resilience to unexpected incidents. But as the number of endpoints, networks, and user interfaces grow exponentially, the task becomes more difficult, and manual incident response management becomes less and less effective.
When a critical incident strikes and hampers your business operations, it's how you handle what comes next that will make all the difference to the extent of damage and the length of downtime. Chaos in the aftermath does not need have to be the default. Your team can stay focused and cool-headed with a solid incident response (IR) plan.
Incident escalation is one of those seemingly mundane issues, the importance of which is often underestimated. Simply put, the escalation process is used to flag issues so that the relevant personnel can respond to situations. Implementation of a well-designed escalation process, however, is anything but simple.
"Businesses need to face the inevitability of being hacked at some point. It's not a question of if, but when — and that's why being proactive to minimize the risk is essential." Robert Egan. When a critical incident hits, what happens to an organization without an efficient incident management plan? Essentially, all stakeholders are left "fighting fires," trying to recover their systems, and get their business back up and running.
Digital transformation has created more gateways for vulnerability and risk. So in addition to natural disasters that can impact a business, organizations are faced with cyberattacks that can truly cripple their business. A solid business continuity plan makes sure that your company is ready for whatever may come its way, be it fire, flood, critical technical failure, or a cyberattack.
