What Is Incident Management? How Does It Help?

Imagine a scenario where internet connectivity is lost for a day due to a denial of service attack. Will your employees be able to work at the same pace they used to every day? No! Their productivity will drastically drop because most of their work is done online. In fact, if you calculate it, your employees would most likely have to work overtime for an entire month or more to recover the losses from that day. This is where incident management comes into the picture, as it is an essential process to avoid these situations. An incident management team is the key to a successful business that doesn’t suffer losses due to unpredictable incidents.

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If you are curious about what incident management is and its benefits, then you have come to the right place. This blog will equip you with knowledge about incident management and help you decide whether you should invest in building your own incident response team.

Incident Management Defined

Incident management is the management of incidents that have occurred during the working hours of an organization. Incident management allows organizations to get back to their normal routine as soon as possible without disrupting their systems.

Cybersecurity incidents can cause great harm to an organization on a large scale. Examples of a cybersecurity incident include a computer system breach, unauthorized access, use of sensitive data without authority, and theft/loss of equipment that is storing data.

What Is the Purpose of Incident Management?

Incident management is used widely throughout the world to avoid disruptive incidents and their harmful outcomes. During the process, the incident is analyzed and logged in, and the response team finds out who is responsible for the incident and what steps should be followed to resolve it.

An incident response policy is not limited to solving small issues faced by the organization. These small issues, when resolved, help avoid major incidents. The faster the issue is resolved, the lesser the impact on the organization. Without a proper incident response, companies might lose valuable data and produce less work, which will eventually lead to lower profits. This will impact the life of the organization and the lives of employees.

Types of Incidents

A single incident response cannot be applied to every incident that occurs during work, as each case is different. For easier classification, incidents can be divided into four types:

Small incidents: Small incidents do not harm the organization too much if they are resolved quickly. Of course, these small incidents can turn into major incidents if organizations do not take them seriously and quickly do something to resolve them.

Major incidents: Incident security causes disruption in companies. Organizations do not face major incidents very often, but when they do it shakes the company to its core. Companies need to be prepared for such incidents. When a major issue occurs, employees often find it hard to tackle the issue because they are not prepared for it. It leaves them in a confused state.

Repetitive incidents: Repetitive incidents can occur often if the previous issues have yet to be resolved. These issues happen when the IT team is not able to identify the cause of the issue.

Complex incidents: Complex incidents are large and repetitive and must be avoided at all costs. The incident response team should be able to maintain a smooth workflow without running into any more issues while working on complex issues.

Incident Management Process

Roles and Responsibilities of an Incident Management Team

An incident management team needs to restore services to their normal state without affecting the services in a negative manner.

◉ An incident response team has to reduce the number of incidents faced by the organization.

◉ An incident response team has to identify the underlying issues that cause repetitive incidents.

◉ An incident response team needs to come up with a plan after every incident which will allow them to resolve the next incident quickly.

Incident Management Tools

The most important tool for an incident response policy is the known error database (KEDB). It is maintained by problem management and contains past incidents and their solutions. Another tool is the incident model. Since new incidents are similar to old ones, the team can apply past solutions to new incidents to resolve them quickly.

Source: eccouncil.org