Strategies to Accelerate Incident Response

Speed in incident response has always been important. Of course, speed is never guaranteed, especially speed during complex incidents. How to get responders in the field faster? Read on to learn how to accelerate incident response.

Accelerating execution speed in incident response

The natural place to start is boosting execution speed. What’s that?

One of the critical components of organizational speed in a complex crisis, execution speed refers to how quickly resources, people, and/or processes are mobilized to support an action.

One measure of execution speed in incident response is the time it takes to activate plans, with organizations striving to activate plans within the “golden hour.”

Incidents have sped up. We must keep up.

However, the golden hour is a relic of a bygone era. For most, crises aren’t just getting faster, they’re getting more complex, too.

Activation speeds must, therefore, keep up for client incident response to be successful. Have they?

The answer is no.

According to the BCI, a mere 22.9% of organizations take five minutes or fewer to activate their plans, with a paltry 2.9% taking zero minutes.

Meanwhile, approximately 57.9% take anywhere between five minutes and a full hour, with an additional 14.7% taking from one to five hours.

How to down activation time to accelerate incident response

In this era of accelerating crises, the questions we must now ask, what can be done to cut down activation times and accelerate incident response?

Well, there’s a significant time-saving advantage to be gained from using formal, digital crisis and incident management software with incident response automation.

So, what’s incident response automation? Incident response automation uses rule-driven logic to:

• Automatically analyze and correlate data from different sources to identify and triage incidents that threaten an organization’s resilience
• Automatically complete routine, standardized tasks to expedite the incident response process and increase response efficiency and effectiveness

Incident response automation capabilities to consider

What incident response automation capabilities should be considered specifically, though? Just as there’s clear ROI to be gained from resilience management platforms that solve multiple use cases in an integrated manner, there’s just as much benefit to be gained from incident response automation capabilities within these platforms that provide value for multiple solution areas.

Which solution areas and associated functionality?

For Business Continuity and Operational Resilience, we recommend:

• Functionality that lets you define your recovery strategies and their associated plans and playbooks. These can then be associated with your Critical Products and Services and Prioritized Activities.
• A platform that during an incident, based on what you have defined as being impacted, automatically suggests the recovery strategies that need to be activated based on the impacts of the incident.
• Functionality that once your recovery strategy is activated, automatically adds associated plans and checklists to the incident for you.

For Crisis and Incident Management, we recommended:

• A Plan Categories feature that allows you to give plans a specific category.
• Based on that category and an associated workflow node, you will be able to automate any disruption scenario to pull through the correct plan automatically to the incident for you.

Finally, effective incident response is a non-negotiable in today’s fast-evolving digital and risk landscapes. And incident response automation, as we’ve laid out, is one means to ensure businesses aren’t overtaken by events.

But what else should you know? Check out our Guide to Incident Response with Automation in Resilience Management to find out.