What separates organizations that bounce back quickly from cyber incidents from those that struggle for months to recover? The answer isn't luck or chance—it's preparation.
Recent breaches across the supermarket and retail sectors have shown just how vulnerable companies can be, and how the impact on services can still be felt weeks, if not months, down the line. But there is good news: building a robust incident response framework transforms chaos into coordinated action.
Incident response is a structured approach to detecting, managing, and recovering from incidents that may affect your organization. Done right, it enables your organization to minimize disruption and stay focused on growth, innovation, and other strategic ambitions.
Recent legislation like NIS2 and DORA in the EU reinforces the importance of incident response practices, requiring organizations within the critical national infrastructure and financial services sectors to develop and maintain a structured incident response approach.
In this blog, I outline five key practices that will turn your organization’s incident response from a reactive scramble to a strategic capability.
Five essential practices for effective incident response
Understand your organization’s goals
Every organization will have different goals and priorities, and your incident response (IR) plan should align to these wider objectives.
For some, the goal may be to return to full operations as quickly as possible. In this scenario, less emphasis is placed on forensic investigation or reporting an incident to the authorities. For others, a need to protect sensitive data or national security concerns may lead to a more protracted response and investigation period. Herein, the initial priorities will be about gathering evidence and confirming the extent of the breach.
Aligning your incident response plan to your organization’s goals will ensure you have clear priorities should the worst happen. This helps you react appropriately, preventing poor decision making that naturally crops up in stressful moments and may ultimately contradict the company’s aims and desired recovery path.
Build a comprehensive response framework
Having an incident response plan is crucial to ensuring that any response is well-coordinated and effective. Make sure your IR plan outlines the following pieces of information to reduce the number of decisions that need to be made under pressure in the heat of the moment:
- Responsibilities: Who is responsible for managing the response, and who needs to be kept informed?
- Communication: What communication channels will be utilized, and when should certain people/teams be looped in? Ideally, communications should be kept to a ‘need to know’ basis – you never know what damage might be done by oversharing or sharing too soon.
- Escalation: Where are the escalation points in the plan? This might be to call out when senior leadership are notified, or the point at which the authorities (like the police) might need to be called.
- Timelines: What timelines are expected for certain tasks? This is especially important if you have reporting requirements to external bodies.
- Support: Do you have internal or external support ready to step in? This may include a specialist IR team or digital forensics team who can identify the issue, contain it, capture logs, etc.
- Insurance: Do you have insurance? What does the policy cover, and when would the insurers need to be notified?
By considering each of these factors before an incident can occur, decision fatigue is reduced, and clear expectations are set for your team’s response.
Balance structure with adaptability
You can’t write a playbook for every single type of event, and being too prescriptive in your planning documents might prevent teams from seeing unique incident characteristics and adapting in real time.
We’d recommend you prepare a generic playbook containing all the information you might need to know – response teams, escalation points, communication channels, etc. The key is to ensure that these steps can apply to a variety of incidents, not just one specific event.
Your plan should emphasize adaptability and focus on the principles of incident response such as identification, containment, eradication, and recovery, rather than imposing a rigid step-by-step set of instructions.
Understand your legislative obligations
While it may not be at the top of everyone’s incident response checklist, failing to adhere to legislative requirements can add to the stress and impact of an incident.
Take time to understand your obligations to government bodies and industry regulators and write these into your incident response plan so they are not forgotten during the chaos. You may want to consider:
- The reporting timelines and how you go about reporting the incident.
- How frequently you must provide updates.
- Whether you have a legislative obligation to notify impacted partners, customers, or the public.
Test and refine your response
While sometimes time consuming, running exercises to test the incident response plan is crucial for identifying gaps and issues with the plan itself. Running iterative exercises means errors are more likely to be noticed and learnings can be used to upgrade policy and increase awareness in anticipation of the ‘real thing’.
The plan can be tested in several different ways, including tabletop exercises, incident simulations, and walkthroughs. Make sure to engage with the relevant parties throughout the development and testing process to ensure that they are aware of the plans and won’t be seeing it for the first time during a live incident.
Focus people’s attention on taking the exercises seriously. Panic can affect people in many ways, but if they have taken the time to learn the plan and know how to follow it, you can expect a better response during a real event.
Even partial exercises are better than none. It doesn’t have to be a full run through every single time; it just needs to reinforce the process and catch any snags.
And remember, creating an incident response plan should not be a one-time activity – the plans need to be tested, improved, and tested again when circumstances change, or new threats are identified.
In summary: Building resilience through preparation
Incident response planning is a crucial part of achieving Digital Enterprise Resilience. It means that should the worst-case scenario become reality, you are well placed to respond and recover, minimizing the impact on your organization, employees, and customers.
Our team at Turnkey can advise you in developing a proper incident response plan. We can also help you to prevent incidents before they arise through controls transformation, risk monitoring, and vulnerability management.
If you’re looking to improve your organization’s incident readiness and resilience, contact us today. Or continue reading here: Best Practice IT Governance and Risk Management Frameworks.
