As we eagerly await the start of 2021, businesses are getting ready to up their defences to combat cyber threats which have become more complicated and sophisticated than ever.
IT security incident management is something every business needs to be familiar with in order to identify and eliminate any potential security threats before they have a chance to wreak havoc.
These incidents can take a variety of shapes and sizes – from firewall breaches and denial-of-service attacks to data breaches, insider threats and viruses. A solid IT incident management plan ensures that a cyber threat is handled and managed quickly, efficiently, and with the least amount of damage to a company’s data or reputation.
How to have an effective IT Incident Management Plan in place
Major IT incidents are very stressful to deal with – in fact, they’re what we like to call the boogiemen of IT problems. That’s how adversely they affect operations and outcomes.
In many conversations revolving around IT incident, ITIL tends to come up quite frequently – the leading best practice for IT service management. According to the latest rollout, ITIL4, an incident with a major business impact requires a swift and coordinated resolution.
So what are the activities that revolve around incident management?
To protect your customers’ and stakeholders interests, your IT team must perform a variety of actions in a specific order. These include:
Incident detection
This typically happens in one of these two ways:
- Your service provider identifies an incident through alerts or trends from the components utilized to offer the service.
- One of your users reports a service issue and the service provider reaffirms it as an incident.
Incident logging
Your service provides logs the incident when it occurs. This entails registering it in a designated system for proper management – and includes assigning the relevant handler for incident management. The handler is also responsible for tracking and handling progress on the incident, including the respective timelines.
Incident classification
In this phase, your service provider will categorize the incident according to:
- Incident type
- Its impact (who and what was affected)
- The speed or urgency required for resolution
- Its priority from a business and customer perspective
Classification really comes in handy for improving the overall process of determining who should be handling the incident and what model (if any) should be used, as well as any existing workaround that may be used.
Incident diagnosis
During this phase, your service provider will investigate to determine what went wrong and the fastest way to ‘normalize’ service.
This can be done by one designated person where the symptoms are often identified according to a previously documented incident similar in nature. For more complex or new incidents altogether, a joint investigation may be conducted.
Incident resolution
This is where a resolution is put into action, whether temporary or permanent. If resolution attempts are not proving to be fruitful, then the support team or unit may revert to diagnosis or disaster recovery plans.
As an orange county managed IT services provider, we can help you understand all the respective stages involved in IT incident management, and implement them correctly for maximum success.
