Even with robust cyberdefenses, your network is still susceptible to hackers, social engineers, ransomware, and other digital hazards. Given the rapid development of technology, there are bound to be some holes and flaws that malicious actors can utilize to stage an attack or gain access to your system. For cases like these, developing a comprehensive incident recovery process is your best response.
Incident Management
In today’s digital landscape, it’s important to have contingency plans in place in the event of a cyberattack. This is where ITIL incident management workflow comes in, which is a set of protocols businesses need to follow should an incident occur. But what are they, exactly? And how are they implemented?
When it comes to the major incident management best practices, they’re best understood when you zoom out and look at the whole picture.The digitalization of the modern world has forced companies to reevaluate their security posture and how they respond to major incidents like network outages.
How to Perform a Security Incident Response Tabletop Exercise
An incident response tabletop exercise is the equivalent of a cybersecurity fire drill. In the digital era, it’s not a matter of if your organization will be a target of a cyber-attack, it’s a matter of when. CNBC reported that in 2018 cybercrime cost as much as $600 billion annually, approaching 1% of the world’s GDP. Cybercrime is a pandemic with repercussions that could drive organizations to early retirement.
No matter how proactive a company’s approach is to its cybersecurity practices, chances are they will be the target of a cyber-attack. Statistics show that it’s not a question of if one occurs, but when. This is where Incident Response Tabletop exercises come in.
The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) developed and released a series of agile incident management processes in the ITIL version 4. This most recent version discusses the 5 steps you should be following throughout an incident management lifecycle:
- Incident identification
- Incident logging
- Incident categorization
- Incident prioritization
- Incident response
Overall, incident management is the process of addressing IT service disruptions and restoring the services according to established service level agreements (SLAs). What starts with a user reporting an issue should ideally end with the service desk fixing the issue as fast as possible.
Detecting security events quickly is one of the most important aspects of network security for most companies. Without a full-spectrum overview of all cyber activity, it can be nearly impossible to coordinate defenses and take down threats on the spot. Thankfully, companies can implement a security incident management plan to effectively handle these types of security events if they should arise.