“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. Preparation prior to a breach is critical to reducing recovery time and costs.” (RSAConference) For 83% of companies, a cyber incident is just a matter of time (IBM). And when it does happen, it will cost the organization millions, coming in at a global average of $4.35 million per breach. The damage isn’t only financial, nor solely related to customer loyalty and brand equity.

The number of tools used by distributed teams to manage incidents has multiplied over the years, leading to a valley of tool sprawl. Throw in manual processes and you’ve got too much toil and multiple points of failure. Maintaining disparate tools and systems isn’t just unwieldy, it’s expensive. Our latest capabilities add to the PagerDuty Operations Cloud to make it easier than ever for teams to consolidate their incident management stack.

Incident response tools are software applications or platforms designed to assist security teams in identifying, managing, and resolving cybersecurity incidents. Incident response is a crucial part of an organization’s cybersecurity strategy, making it possible to detect threats, analyze vulnerabilities, respond to attacks, and recover from security breaches. Incident response tools are vital for safeguarding organizations against evolving cyber threats.

Last month, the Singapore bank DBS experienced a 10-hour outage of its digital services. Not only was it massively disruptive to customers, but it caused the bank’s stock to lose 1.4% of its value in a single day. And it’s not the first time DBS has had to deal with the fallout of an IT snafu; in November 2021, Singapore’s finance regulatory body imposed significant additional capital requirements on the bank after its digital banking services were disrupted for two days.

Incident response has been the cornerstone of reliability for decades. From digging in the server logs to navigating modern observability dashboards, responding quickly to incidents and outages is a big part of minimizing downtime. And it should be! When something breaks, your team should move as quickly as possible to address and repair the problem.

More data for data’s sake doesn’t help anyone. What organizations need is more information–actionable insight. With data coming from incoming streams of events and alerts, teams don’t have enough time to look at each one. And they struggle to parse and consolidate this data in order to figure out what they need to do next to resolve an incident.

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is a critical discipline that focuses on ensuring the continuous availability and performance of modern systems and applications. One of the most vital aspects of SRE is incident response, a structured process for identifying, assessing, and resolving system incidents that can lead to downtime, revenue loss, and brand reputation damage.

At Vanta, our goal is to nurture a positive security culture in everything we do—which is especially critical given that helping our customers improve their security and compliance posture starts with our own. Employees are the key to our security resilience, so we strive to build and support a strong culture of incident response in tandem. Here’s what that means to us at Vanta.

In today's digital age, IT departments play a crucial role in maintaining the overall functionality and security of an organization. One essential tool for managing service outages and downtime is the incident response playbook. This comprehensive guide provides IT departments with the necessary processes and strategies to resolve incidents in a timely and efficient manner.

Looking into runbook automation? We explain how runbook automation works, with examples and tips on how to use it to streamline your incident response process.