Incident Management

Incident Management is the process used by organizations to detect, respond to, manage, and resolve IT and cybersecurity incidents in a structured and timely manner, minimizing disruption to operations and ensuring continuous improvement.

It is a broader discipline than just cybersecurity incident response — it includes any unplanned interruption or reduction in the quality of an IT service, and is a core part of frameworks like ITIL, ISO 27001, and NIST.

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🎯 Goals of Incident Management

Goal	Description
Restore services quickly	Minimize impact on users and operations
Minimize business disruption	Prevent escalation or wider system compromise
Record and track incidents	Ensure accountability and trend analysis
Facilitate compliance	Meet regulatory and policy obligations (e.g., PCI DSS, HIPAA)
Enable continuous improvement	Learn from incidents and update processes

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🌀 Incident Management Lifecycle

Phase	Key Activities
1. Detection	Identifying incidents via monitoring tools, user reports, or automated alerts
2. Logging	Documenting incident details in a ticketing or IR platform
3. Categorization	Classifying incident (e.g., security, performance, availability, compliance)
4. Prioritization	Assigning severity based on business impact and urgency
5. Response	Investigation, mitigation, escalation (if needed), and communication
6. Resolution	Implementing a permanent fix or workaround
7. Closure	Documenting resolution, updating stakeholders, and closing the ticket
8. Review	Root cause analysis (RCA) and lessons learned

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📋 Incident Management Framework (Table Format)

Component	Details
Incident Types	Security breach, server outage, malware, data loss, DDoS, application failure
Severity Levels	P1 (critical), P2 (high), P3 (medium), P4 (low)
Reporting Methods	User ticket, SIEM alert, monitoring system, phone/email notification
Escalation Procedures	Defined contacts for each severity level, 24x7 on-call staff
Communication Plan	Templates and stakeholders (IT, legal, compliance, execs, external)
Resolution Time Targets	SLA-based targets (e.g., P1: 4 hrs, P2: 8 hrs)
Documentation	Ticket history, screenshots, logs, user communications, timeline
Post-Incident Review	PIR or RCA meeting, identifying gaps, and improvement recommendations

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🛠 Tools for Incident Management

Tool Category	Examples	Function
Ticketing System	ServiceNow, Jira, Freshservice	Track incidents and manage lifecycle
SIEM/SOC Tools	Splunk, QRadar, LogRhythm	Log correlation and real-time alerting
EDR/XDR	CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Microsoft Defender	Endpoint incident detection
Communication	Microsoft Teams, Slack, PagerDuty	Internal and external coordination
Automation	SOAR (e.g., Palo Alto Cortex XSOAR)	Automate repetitive incident response tasks
Knowledge Base	Confluence, SharePoint	Store SOPs and runbooks

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🧾 Deliverables in an Incident Management Program

Deliverable	Purpose
Incident Management Policy	Defines scope, responsibilities, classifications, and escalation paths
Standard Operating Procedures	Response playbooks for various incident types
Incident Register	Central log of all reported incidents with details and resolution
Root Cause Analysis Reports	Documented findings post high/critical incidents
Dashboard Reports	Trends, KPIs, SLAs for leadership visibility

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✅ Best Practices

• Maintain runbooks and playbooks for known incident types
• Conduct incident simulations / tabletop exercises quarterly
• Set up automated alerting and ticket creation from monitoring tools
• Use SLAs to drive timely responses and hold teams accountable
• Have a well-defined communication protocol (especially during high-severity incidents)
• Perform regular audits of incident records for continuous improvement

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Would you like a template Incident Management Plan, or help integrating incident workflows into ServiceNow, Jira, or a SIEM?