The ITIL definition of an incident is “an unplanned interruption to or a reduction in quality of an IT Service or unavailability of the service”. An incident could be caused by an asset that is not functioning properly or a network failure, or a human error.
Incident response is one of the most challenging tasks that IT teams face. It's challenging not just because it typically involves many stakeholders and moving pieces, but also because teams usually face pressure to respond as quickly as possible. That's why investing in incident response automation is a wise choice. Although it may not be possible to automate every aspect of every incident response workflow, being able to automate at least the major elements of incident response will yield incident management processes that are faster, more reliable, and more consistent.Keep reading to learn about the components of incident response and which incident response activities to start automating.
When critical incidents happen — which they inevitably do 😅 — and you’re in the middle of trying to figure out what the best thing to do is, it can feel comforting to know that you’ve got a pre-prepared list of instructions to follow, commonly known as an “incident response plan”: In theory this sounds quite simple, and a typical flow you might envision is: It might be tempting to think that the hardest part of running incidents is finding or writing a checkl
As a solutions engineer for FireHydrant, I speak with a wide variety of companies about their incident management programs — from start-ups with a handful of employees to large enterprise companies with thousands of engineers. Whether they’re looking to establish their incident management program or mature it, the same questions remain.
Incident response refers to effectively responding to infrastructure issues and resolving them in the shortest time frame possible. Due to several loss-inducing high-profile outages over the last few years, organizations have sought to create rigorous processes with specialized tools to resolve incidents quickly and learn from their failures. As one of the first platforms to enter the incident response space, PagerDuty is a dominant player, but over the years, competing platforms have begun carving out their own niche in the incident response space.
Resolving the incident is only half the battle when it comes to responding to incidents. For many teams, incident communication is an afterthought, leaving stakeholders inside and outside the organization guessing what happened. But ensuring that important information about the incident is disseminated clearly and quickly is essential.
World-class incident responders are a strategic asset in today’s world where the frequency and sophistication of cyber security attacks continue to increase every year, as do the associated financial damages: As such, more and more organizations are looking to grow their cyber incident response expertise, both with inhouse staff as well as by engaging with third-party experts.
