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.
No matter how you design your architecture or what technologies you implement, critical incidents will happen. When things go wrong, it is easy to get carried away and forget about the bigger picture. But your work isn’t done after you fix the immediate problem; now is the time to take a look at how the incident actually happened so that you can learn from it.
The incident response industry is anything but static, and it is often said that the key to staying ahead is staying informed. But that’s easier said than done. Faced with the increasing sophistication of cyber attacks and the growing complexity of IT architectures, we often drown in our daily slew of tickets and alerts, with no time left to spare.
While there are some very good sources out there on how to manage a critical incident, Google also wrote a chapter on incident management in their book, “Site Reliability Engineering”. In this chapter, the folks at Google present their approach to a well-designed critical incident management process.
The importance of effective business continuity planning (BCP) cannot be understated. Being able to avoid and mitigate the risks and damages associated with a disruption to operations is critical to the health of any business. And, the two main pillars upon which a robust BCP program rests are, of course, the plan and the testing program.
According to the ITIL, the framework of best practices for delivering IT services, there is a recommended process flow for how to handle major incidents. Clearly, the IT community would be well served to follow the ITIL’s systematic and professional approach, whose benefits, according to CIO Magazine.
