Today’s cybersecurity threats are so fast and sophisticated that they can disrupt IT functions for hours, days, and even months. For example, the ransomware attack prevents users from accessing their systems or files unless they pay a ransom to notorious extortionists. Under such circumstances, having an effective incident management program is always necessary.
What is ITIL Incident Management?
Restoring services to their normal operations in order to prevent further loss is one of the key goals of any incident management program. Likewise, ITIL Incident Management (IM) is a reactive process used to restore normal IT operations of a business in the aftermath of an incident, usually through diagnosing and escalating procedures. In a nutshell, IM can be used to:
- Detect and record the details of the incident
- Match incidents in the face of known problems
- Resolve incidents as rapidly as possible
- Prioritize incidents based on their urgency and impact
- Escalate incidents to other teams such as Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) in order to resolve them in a timely manner.
Why ITIL Incident Management Is Necessary?
Since IT incidents can be dangerous in terms of money and reputation, it is always necessary to have a proper plan for managing them. Incidents can still happen even after taking precautions against them because cybercriminals are sophisticated in their operations. ITIL incident management involves fours ways, which are listed below:
- Maintaining Service Levels: In order to meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs), it is essential to avoid incidents using a risk mitigation strategies or strategies. Although these solutions pay their crucial role in preventing the incidents from happening, nevertheless, it cannot be presumed that your company is now secured altogether or no incident will occur in the short run. This is the reason ITIL incident management plan comes into place. In addition to it, using right infrastructure monitoring software is also invaluable to prevent IT incidents.
- Meeting Service Availability Requirements: Timeline is very important for your business. In spite of the incidents, you must meet service availability requirements in due time. The ITIL incident management will certainly help you to ensure business continuity by preventing downtime and ensuring the availability of critical services.
- Increasing Staff Efficiency and Productivity: A skilled staff is required to increase the efficiency of ITIL incident management. In order to free up staff time, using a performance and capacity management tool is helpful. ITIL incident management also supports the automatic monitoring of the incidents.
- Improving User Satisfaction: Users, customers or employees are the backbones of every business. We cannot win the trust of all business stakeholders unless we ensure that their investments are secure. In other words, they should not be affected by an incident. Practicing ITIL management process can help you satisfy your users. By implementing this security measure, you can avoid incidents at large extent. Capacity planning software can be helpful to ensure that all business stakeholders are happy with your company’s performance.
Post-incident review
When an incident has been closed and investigation has also been completed, it is a good practice prepare a documentation containing all the details regarding the incident such as name of the virus or malware used during the attack, date and time of occurrence, the cost they involved, and procedures that were required to neutralize the incident. Such documentation can help organizations to address their current cybersecurity loopholes and enhance their cybersecurity posture. Doing so will help them to prevent a similar type of incidents in the future and decrease the overall volume of future incidents.
Benefits of ITIL incident management
ITIL incident management is invaluable due to the benefits it offers. Below is the list of them:
- Enhancing incident visibility
- Improving incident response time
- Improving productivity
- Maintaining and improving user satisfaction.
