An effective incident response plan (IRP) can minimize disruption, damage to reputation and data, and the cost of an attack. It is why all businesses should have one!
An IRP should include security playbooks that can automate response. Teams, systems, or solutions can run these scripts.
Real-time Alerts
Automate on-call schedules and ensure all team members receive phone, email, and SMS alerts. Compared to other tools, OnPage sends signals to multiple people simultaneously, ensuring every team member is noticed. Messages continue for up to eight hours until acknowledged so teams can get offline alerts. With real-time alerts, the most critical incidents rise above the noise.
While alerts are primarily qualified informational events that predefined system logic indicates that a human may need to intervene, incidents are confirmed degradations that require immediate diagnosis and resolution. An example of this would be a business website outage, a security breach, or an API error.
The key is to prioritize alerts based on their impact on the business. A website outage will precede a brief slow-down of an infrequently used feature. And a malware attack will take priority over an image that isn’t appearing in a web app.
Automated Response
Using automation to respond to alerts lets your team focus on more critical manual tasks while protecting against human error. When an incident occurs, it translates into a faster mean time to detection and a lower mean time to resolve (MTTD and MTTR).
Currently, security teams are overwhelmed with alerts and have to determine whether or not they refer to actual threats or false positives. It can take days for one incident, leading to “alert fatigue,” which leaves your organization more vulnerable. An automated response can help by eliminating the manual work of determining what each alert means, reducing the number of uninvestigated signals.
During an incident, an incident response platform can help keep your team on the same page by documenting and communicating important information. It helps your company respond to incidents quickly and confidently, maintaining consumer trust and resilience despite a data breach.
Detailed Reporting
Just like hospitals and tech companies have on-call employees to deal with emergencies, your business needs a dedicated team to handle incidents. An incident management system enables this team to work as a group and track everything in one place, even remotely or with external experts.
Detailed reporting lets the IR team identify what worked and what didn’t during an incident response. It also gives the IR team insights into what to improve in the future.
Another feature that many incident response systems include is the ability to create playbooks. Unlike an incident response policy, which offers a high-level view of how to respond, playbooks provide detailed, step-by-step processes for specific incident types. Using playbooks can help to reduce ad-hoc responses and ensure consistency during incident responses.
Incident response teams can be overwhelmed by the number of threats and alerts. It can prevent damage caused by a data breach. Automated IR tools allow teams to focus on responding to the most critical threats.
Interoperability
While interoperability is making great strides thanks to new systems that allow disparate public safety technologies to communicate, the issue still needs to be fully resolved. Silos between various agencies can hinder response efforts and prevent the ability to act swiftly in a crisis.
A well-thought-out incident response plan (IRP) can help reduce ad-hoc responses by providing clear guidelines for responding to cyber attacks or natural disasters. The IRP will identify the steps that need to be taken and define what tools should be used, how the steps should be performed, who is responsible for performing those tasks, and more.
IRPs can also be transformed into automation playbooks that integrate with relevant systems and tools, enabling them to be initiated when an alert or incident occurs. It automates the response process and allows a faster, more consistent approach to tackling security events. The IRP will also provide a detailed audit trail that can be used for compliance and reporting purposes.
Scalability
In IT systems terms, scalability is the ability of a system to function well when used in a higher volume than it usually is. This volume could be users, data storage capacity, or the number of transactions handled.
Incident response processes must be broken down into more manageable parts to achieve scalability. It is called the span of control, and it’s a key element to the success of any incident response team. Having a team that can operate with a narrow span of control allows the team to remain focused on the task. It prevents the unit from becoming distracted by non-critical issues occurring elsewhere in the business.
The best way to ensure that incidents can be responded to in a consistent and standardized manner is by creating playbooks. These are step-by-step process documents that outline standardized incident response processes. They can be manual or automated and are integrated with relevant systems and tools to execute the steps automatically when an alert or an incident is identified.