Agility matters in incident response, and the easiest way to spring into action is by having a well-defined team in place ahead of time. The right people in the right roles will help you respond to and resolve incidents more quickly and efficiently. In fact, we found in the Incident Benchmark Report that incidents with roles assigned had a 42% lower mean time to resolution than those that didn’t. But what roles do you need to fill?

At incident.io, we deal with small incidents all the time—we auto-create them from PagerDuty on every new error, so we get several of these a day. As a team, we’ve mastered tackling these small incidents since we practice responding to them so often. However, like most companies, we’re less familiar with larger and more severe incidents—like the kind that affect our whole product, or a part of our infrastructure such as our database, or event handling.

Software programs known as incident management solutions assist organizations in managing occurrences, tracking and monitoring incident response activity, and evaluating the performance of their incident response teams. They are crucial to any organization’s incident response strategy and can aid teams in coordinating their efforts, getting in touch with key stakeholders, and preserving their work.

When I joined Honeycomb two years ago, we were entering a phase of growth where we could no longer expect to have the time to prevent or fix all issues before things got bad. All the early parts of the system needed to scale, but we would not have the bandwidth to tackle some of them graciously. We’d have to choose some fires to fight, and some to let burn.

Incident response is a critical component of every comprehensive security program. Knowing how to respond appropriately to security incidents is essential for any organization. This article will discuss the six phases of incident response and how they can help organizations better protect their networks and data from security threats. Each phase of the incident response process will be outlined, discussing the purpose of each step and the best practices for implementation.

With more than $80 billion of loan collateral in its systems, DataScan is an industry leader in providing solutions for wholesale asset financing and inventory risk management. The company’s InfoSec leadership understood that they needed to take a whole new approach to incident response and to advance its security maturity. Having multiple tools for managing incidents and conducting business was translating into inefficiencies, prolonged resolutions, and stress.