Simply put, effective incident management is an essential part of all enterprise business systems. Why?
Because as tech tools and workflows become increasingly complex and interconnected, systems become increasingly vulnerable to unplanned downtime. Downtime that can hit any system at any time - with potential impact to both internal and external business operations. Costs for incidents are typically measured in tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars per minute.
With such potential impact on the line, organizations are rapidly evolving incident response practices to ensure they can be managed as quickly and effectively as possible. This means taking a holistic approach to an incident, understanding how it evolves, and how to continually improve the resilience of systems. From an academic perspective, there are several opinions on how many stages are associated with a typical incident response workflow. While this may be different for varying organizations, we’ll focus on the following five stages to represent the incident lifecycle:
- Preparation
- Detection & Alerting
- Containment
- Remediation
- Analysis
Without consideration of each of these stages, organizations are exposing themselves to the risk that incidents will be mismanaged, resulting in unnecessary delays and associated costs. Below, we will look at each of these stages, and offer recommendations on practices that will help teams address incidents more efficiently.