Incident management is your organization’s first line of defense. When incidents occur, internal teams must be ready to respond quickly. While incidents can happen anytime, it’s unrealistic to expect incident managers to be prepared to perform manual root cause analysis. Manually monitoring and analyzing applications on multiple servers is extremely difficult, which is why human reaction times have traditionally limited the speed of incident management.
In a perfect world, technology stays on and runs flawlessly. But we all know this isn't the case. Like any organization, xMatters sometimes experiences unplanned incidents. What we can control is how we respond to them. To resolve incidents quickly, it's important to coordinate an organized response.
Knowing who is in charge helps teams avoid confusion about who to turn to during a crisis, allowing them to focus their efforts where needed. When the pressure is on, an incident commander should have an established response plan to ensure that responders act quickly and coordinate efficiently, and with actionable insights this can be made possible.
Before you can choose the proper tools for your organization, you have to understand its essential business processes. Once you know an essential business process, you can review software applications that will help make your organization more efficient and accurate. Unfortunately, many organizations do not understand their essential business processes. This makes it nearly impossible for them to streamline their organizations, which puts them at a disadvantage in the marketplace.
Incident response aims to identify, limit, and mitigate an incident. Whether such an occurrence is a security breach or a hardware failure, formulating and continuously strengthening an incident response strategy has become vital for all businesses in the digital age. Your incident response strategy consists of the processes your organization takes to handle incidents-such as network outages and service-impacting bugs-and the steps taken to mitigate incidents.
Maintaining IT infrastructure is a consistent challenge for system administrators, site reliability engineers (SREs), supporting developers, and technicians. Several factors can impact system performance, cause outages, or impact customer experience. On top of that, not all incidents are created equal. The impacts and severity of a system outage affecting 10% of your users are different from an outage impacting 90%.
What are the keys to building software development security into the early stages of product development? And what are the costs of ignoring security? In this article, xMatters Product Manager Kit Brown-Watts provides his insights on the matter. Every investment decision comes with trade-offs, usually in the form of cost, quality, or speed. The CQS Matrix, as I like to call it, captures the dilemma most product people face.
