How Leaders Can Work with IT for Effective Incident Response

Each day, technology grows in sophistication and capability. Moving forward, organizations need to proactively use technology to their advantage to best protect daily operations. When a security incident or system outage occurs, it’s not just an IT problem, it’s a business problem. Veeam reports that the average downtime associated with a ransomware attack is 2 weeks. Can your business stay afloat for 2 weeks without operations? That’s why leaders need to collaborate with their IT teams to ensure an effective incident response. In this article, we will recap our recent webinar and discuss some strategies leaders can use to collaborate with IT for effective incident response.

Foster a strong relationship with your IT team through collaboration tools

The first step to effective collaboration and this goes for any department, is to build a strong relationship with your IT team. What does this look like? As a leader, aim to understand all the roles and responsibilities of your IT team members. With this clear understanding, from a leadership perspective, you can make sure the team has the resources they need to do their job effectively. Additionally, having established regular communications/meetings allows trust to develop between teammates, so that you, the leader, can rely on the IT team when an incident occurs.

Additionally, the use of collaboration tools can help leaders and their IT teams work more effectively together during an incident. In the face of an incident, it is all about response time. How quickly can you act? Utilizing tools like incident management platforms, communication tools, and document-sharing platforms can help teams work more efficiently and effectively.

Establish an Incident Response Plan (IRP)

Every organization, no matter the size or industry, should have an incident response plan. IRPs are a set of procedures that outline in detail how an organization will respond to a security incident or system outage. It should include details such as:

• Who on the team is responsible for what
• What communication channels to use
• What steps to take to restore systems and data

As a leader of your organization, creating a plan allows for a certain form of accountability. Team members understand in the face of a crisis what responsibility is theirs.

Conduct regular incident response training and updates

Incident response training is essential – it ensures that your IT team knows who is responsible for what facet of the business in the event of an incident. Leaders should aim to work with their IT team to conduct regular training sessions to ensure that everyone is familiar with the incident response plan, and to provide additional training on new threats and vulnerabilities.

Once you have an incident response plan, it’s important to realize that it is not bulletproof. Technology is ever-changing and bad actors continue to use more sophisticated technology to disrupt organizations. Reviewing and updating steps in the incident response plan is critical to ensure a new form of technology doesn’t cause your IRP to be outdated.

Management of Backups

Listen to our president, John Raos, discuss the importance of backups in the incident response team’s playbook.

Conduct post-incident reviews

So, your organization suffered an incident and used the response plan to recover. What’s next? After an incident has been resolved, you need to conduct a post-incident review. The purpose is to identify what went wrong and what could be improved for the future. Leaders should work with their IT team to conduct a review and implement any necessary changes to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.

Effective incident response requires cross-department collaboration between leaders and their IT teams. Best practices to foster a strong relationship with your IT team include; establishing an incident response plan, conducting regular training and updates, using collaboration tools, and conducting post-incident reviews. With this, leaders can ensure that their organization is prepared to respond to any incident that may occur. This is just the tip of the iceberg – our President discussed with executives from Veeam and Blue Team Alpha in great length the benefits of cyber resiliency, and we invite you to watch the on-demand recording.