A Holistic Approach to Organizational Incident Response Design: Integrating People, Process, and Technology
Background: When an incident occurs in your environment, you should be prepared to respond effectively from the perspectives of people, processes, and technologies. Proper preparation ensures a coordinated response and minimizes confusion within your team. Without such readiness, incidents can lead to significant disorganization and hinder your ability to manage the situation effectively.
Before diving into the process, it's important to understand that incidents can have impact on your team and the entire organization. One major effect is stress; another is confusion—even experienced professionals may find themselves unsure of how to respond. Additionally, in the post-incident phase, the psychological effects can impact anyone involved.
Peoples: Here are the participant of specialists who needs to be involved into the incident
- Incident Commander
- System stakeholder / Ownerships
- Impacted system engineers
- Legal team
- Incident Responders
- Malware analysts / threat hunters / Security Detection Engineers / SOC analysts based on situation .
- External partners if applicable
- External Communication Team
Processes:
Processes should be clearly defined between two groups. One group should consist of high-level stakeholders, including C-level executives, the legal team, the incident commander, the external communications team, and system owners. The other group should include engineers and other team members who are directly responsible for working with the technologies involved.
However, before implementing these processes, your organization should foster a tabletop exercise culture. These exercises help teams prepare for incidents and reveal potential gaps in your response plan. Following each exercise, playbooks should be created or updated to reflect the lessons learned and ensure structured responses in future incidents.
Technologies: Each incident can differ from previous ones and may occur in various environments or infrastructures. Therefore, your incident response strategy should include the ability to acquire or develop tools that are adaptable to different technologies, helping to streamline the incident response process. These tools should be thoroughly tested across different environments and must be compatible with the specific infrastructure in which they will be used.
Conclusion: Each incident involves a complex series of actions, from high-level decision-making to technical implementation. That’s why it’s important to start preparing in advance. Proactive preparation can be a key factor in the success of your incident response process.