An incident response plan includes instructions for the members of a cybersecurity team or IT team at a company that can help in the detection and recovery of network security problems. It plan may revolve around problems such as service outages, loss of data, and cybercrime that can hinder the daily activities of an organization/company.
Often at times, a large data or network breach can impact the work at an organization, slowing it down over a course of many days or months. In the case of a major disruption, there is always a need for a detailed plan that the IT staff can use to contain, stop, and recover from the unwanted incident.
The counterpart of this plan is a disaster recovery plan which deals with the physical disruptions from floods, rainstorms, earthquakes, and other natural disasters. So do not get confused between the two!
What does an incident recovery team do?
Incident recovery teams include a group of staff members or those who are hired externally, for the implementation of a plan. In general, these are trained individuals are can preserve, collect, and analyze the data related to an incident. Often at times, the incident recovery team also has to work with communications experts and lawyers in order to meet legal obligations.
Is incident response plan absolutely necessary?
In case you do not have any data related threats as of yet, you may be all good. However, in case you have experienced a cyber attack before, you would definitely know the chaos that it can cause. Whether there is a physical threat or a virtual threat such as security breaches, it can be very crippling for an organization to lose data. It will totally disrupt its functionality for many days or months.
In this case, this plan helps in the mitigation of the risks and allows the organization to stay prepared beforehand.
Why do you need an incident response plan?
If your network hasn’t been threatened yet, it will be. If it has, then you know the chaos that can follow a cyber-attack. Whether a threat is virtual (security breaches) or physical (power outages or natural disasters), losing data or functionality can be crippling. This plan and a disaster recovery plan help you mitigate risk and prepare for a range of events.
Creating a plan
- Determine all of your network’s critical components
It is important to store and replicate all the critical data in remote locations. In this regard, you will have to determine all of the critical components and prioritize a backup. This way, recovery will be far easier.
- Identify all the single failure points in the network and work on them
A plan B for every component that is critical such as staff roles, software, and hardware is of great importance. To identify these points, and work on them.
- Work on a workforce continuity plan.
Often at times, some processes and locations become inaccessible after a security breach. Allow employees to work remotely in order to ensure safety and to reduce business downtimes.
- Creating the actual plan.
After that, draw a formal response plan that includes a list of responsibilities and roles of the response team, business continuity plan, summaries of technologies/resources/tools, and a list of the data recovery and critical network processes.