Be prepared with incident management for your business
Breaches happen, but most companies are not prepared. An incident is an unexpected disruption to a service. It disturbs the normal operation thus affecting end user’s productivity. An Incident may be caused due to an asset that is not functioning properly or network failure. Incident management is a term describing the activities of an organisation to identify, analyse and correct hazards to prevent a future re-occurrence in a way that aims to create as little negative impact on the business as possible.
Incident management systems deliver many business benefits such as smooth business operations, improved productivity, satisfied end-users and prevention of major incidents. Here are five steps to improve your incident management processes:
1. Stay calm
Don’t panic. Most breaches remain undetected for months or years, so there’s no need to freak out and rush into impulsive solutions. Take a deep breath and focus on what needs to be done.
1. Save all evidence
Don’t shut down your computer, that’ll wipe out important information. Logs are a valuable source of evidence. Disconnect from the network to prevent the attacker from continuing his actions and stealing your data.
2. Get help
Get a professional involved; they’ll be able to help you with organising the forensics and public relations. Write down what happened to help the forensics team to reconstruct the timeline and find out what happened.
3. Create a cyber security culture in the workplace
Cyber security is not only the IT department’s concern, but should be everyone’s business. Begin with creating awareness amongst your employees.
4. Be prepared
Make sure you have visibility to your own organisation and educate yourself about its infrastructure. This will help you to defend against future attacks.
The goal of incident management aims to reduce the negative impact of an incident on business operations by restoring things to normal as quickly as possible. The result is better levels of service quality. Incident management ultimately assists companies to better prepare themselves for the inevitable risk of being breached.
