In a world where businesses are constantly under attack from hackers and data breaches, organizations must have the best tools to help them manage these incidents. Starting with your incident response strategy and business crisis plan can help you choose a platform that suits your goals and integrates with your current processes and tools.
How to Use an Accident Response Platform
An incident response platform provides teams the tools to work faster and better – before, during, and after an accident. When paired with a crash detection solution, it triggers workflows to check in with the driver, assess whether they need emergency services, and begin collecting critical crash details for their FNOL report.
Moreover, it also reduces costs by eliminating secondary tow, storage, and release fees by automating creating an insurance claim at the scene.
Incident Management
An effective incident response plan requires a platform that supports your team’s workflows. Look for a tool that integrates with your existing devices, such as a ticketing system or chat platform, and allows teams to collaborate seamlessly with a central hub. Ideally, this includes text, audio, and video capabilities for teams to communicate with one another and provide feedback during the incident resolution process.
Incident management solutions also help to ensure that each incident is logged and documented and that a complete historical record is maintained. It is an excellent way to spot trends in your ticketing data and prevent incidents from falling through the cracks. During this stage, you can also begin to categorize and prioritize each incident, which can help determine how much priority should be given to a particular issue.
It’s crucial that your incident response tool can support a variety of communication channels, including email, a self-service portal, a mobile app, Freddy, a chatbot, feedback widgets, and walk-ups. It allows your customers to get the support they need quickly and efficiently, no matter the time of day.
The best solutions support multiple ticketing systems and can be integrated with a CMDB, providing more context for your teams while helping them reduce MTTR. Some also support security orchestration, which automates incident responses by triggering other internal or external tools based on defined incident analysis parameters and processes.
Incident Response Planning
A robust incident response (IR) program is more than a technical problem. It also requires effective organizational planning. Whether you’re dealing with a cybersecurity incident or a natural disaster, your IR plan is the roadmap that guides your organization through preparing for an event and mitigating its impacts.
The first step of a good incident response plan is establishing procedures for how your team should respond when an incident occurs. It includes defining what constitutes an incident, identifying who executes specific tasks, and how they should be completed.
Other vital aspects of an IR plan include defining how to contain an incident, how to eradicate an incident, and how to recover impacted systems. Some of these steps may require elevated access to privileged systems, and you might need to leverage an incident response service to assist your internal CSIRT.
Another critical element of an exemplary IR plan is ensuring that all information from the response process is captured and documented. It can help your organization better understand the full scope of an incident and identify security controls, policies, and procedures that failed or needed improvement. It is known as a post-incident review and should be conducted within two weeks of the end of an incident.
Runbooks
Runbooks are a vital tool for incident response planning. They are a step-by-step guide that consolidates best practices, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and detailed instructions into one easily accessible resource. Runbooks improve efficiency and reduce potential human errors during a critical incident.
When creating a new runbook, research previous incident reports and post-mortems to determine how specific issues were resolved. Take notes on the most efficient and effective solutions, then document those processes to create your runbook. It helps future teams avoid unnecessary research and save time encountering similar problems.
A good runbook includes all necessary documentation, hardware and software technical specifications, escalation protocols, monitoring system information, and communications guidelines. You may also have screenshots and diagrams for additional clarity. Once completed, field test the document to identify missing or incorrect steps and revise accordingly.
Additionally, look for opportunities to automate your process when possible. Whether that’s triggering alerts when predefined thresholds are exceeded, auto-scaling cloud resources during peak load, or automating patch deployments, incorporating automation into your incident response plan can help you achieve a faster and more consistent resolution time while saving you valuable IT resources.
